I Must Confess
April 24th, 2008 | by ScottIt appears that you're new here, if you like what you read, please subscribe to the news feed or sign up for the Leap eTips news and updates email list. Thank you for visiting :)
I’m a terrible blogger here on the Leap and it has cost at least one of my readers some time and money. It’s all my fault, so I have to step up to the plate and take responsibility.
You see, the manner in which I blog here at the Leap, from the topics I pick to the way in which I structure my postings is really all wrong for blogging.
So, anyone who were to follow my example from here when creating their own blog is almost sure to retard their growth and success, costing them time and money. Linda found that out the hard way, and I am truly sorry for that. However, I have helped her to overcome this initial set back and believe her blog is now on its way to a healthy and prosperous future.
In my own defense I’d like to say that I don’t cover blogging very much here, so I never considered that anyone might think following my style or presentation from here was a good idea.
When I do talk about blogging, its usually because I’m talking about some blogging tool, either a platform or some sort of plug-in, but I almost never touch on the actual practice of blogging itself. So again, it never occurred to me that someone might think my example of blogging from here was one to be followed.
In fact, you have to go back to October to find the last time I talked about the practice of blogging, and even then it was a brief overview for starting up a new blog in which I mention doing several things very differently from how I do them here.
Okay, Why Is My Blogging Style Here So Wrong?
It’s simple really, on any other blog I wouldn’t do what I do here, because it doesn’t appeal to casual readers in any way.
To build a huge following, a blogger needs to make their conversations (postings) engaging, and try to encourage lots of participation from readers.
In other words, if you are starting a new blog and want it to be popular you should do everything you can to make the conversations become ongoing.
I don’t do that here. Most of what I’m writing is for people who don’t know much about the topics I’m covering but want to learn, so I try to offer my best “A to Z” thoughts and insights with each posting and then move on to the next topic. To be honest, I try not to encourage conversations with my postings.
Why Don’t I Try To Encourage Ongoing Conversations Here?
Let me be clear, questions are always welcomed and I answer all of them happily, but to just spawn follow-up commentary on something I’ve already said all I have to offer about the topic in the posting isn’t what I want to do on this blog.
So, I almost never structure my postings the way a good blogger should, for example a good form for a blog post is to use what’s called the “list” or “bullet” format, where you break the post into sections, each titled with either the who, what, when, where or how of your topic.
Since online readers tend to scan pages rather than read top down, breaking a post up like that and giving each section a bold headline of its own works to pull more “page scanners” into the conversation. I almost never do that here, so I don’t really appeal to those casual page scanners.
Basically, I feel that comments which aren’t questioning in nature tend to be regurgitations of what’s already been said in the posting, and to me that would be a waste of your time to read the same things over and over in follow up comments.
To Summarize
With this blog I try to cover topics I feel are helpful to those who want to learn about them, and I put everything I have to offer on each topic into the postings I make.
I also make it as clear as I can what the topic of each posting is with my titles, or at least within the first paragraph–so that readers can decide from there whether to read the full posting or not. If I were trying to build popularity for my blog (as you should be doing) I would use killer titles and sensationalized headlines all over the place to suck more readers in.
Use the Tabloids as an example. Not the part about stretching the truth and fabricating facts, but study the approaches they take with titles and headlines. It works to grab attention at the check-out lines of Grocery stores, and it works for bloggers too.
But here, I’m not trying to build myself up as an ubber authority on anything, and I have no desires to boost my readership levels by drawing in casual readers through optimizing my presentations.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that, and I do with every other blog I’m involved with. It just isn’t my goal for this one.
I created this blog with a simple intention: to share all that I could from my own experiences in a way that the information would be there for whomever wanted to find it.
I never put much thought into optimizing or promoting this blog, beyond getting it indexed so that searchers who wanted it could find the topics I’ve covered.
That’s how I started and will be how I continue into the future with this blog.
So Don’t Follow My Blogging Example!
At least, not from this blog because here I do almost everything wrong.
There are plenty of great blogs out there, find a few that are popular in your niche and just look at how they present information there. How titles and in-posting headlines are used. How media is incorporated. How follow-up comments are encouraged by the writing style.
You’ll be a much better blogger from that then you ever would be following my example here, trust me.
Stumble It!
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One Response to “I Must Confess”
By Dude on May 23, 2008 | Reply
I like your writing style. It contains lots of information and very little filler content.