The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 5: Blogging Without Examination

Feb 17, 2008

The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 5: Blogging Without Examination
by Skellie

If you’ve been wondering why your blog or website hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered four parts:

In this post, I’ll be outlining the fifth and final barrier to success: failure to blog consciously.

Part 5: Blogging Without Examination

No, I’m not talking about alien abduction style examination (thankfully). I’m referring to the kind of examination we do to evaluate what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what we want to get out of life.

I sometimes hear from bloggers who say that they’ve been trying to succeed for two years or more, plugging away on the same blog, and still find it a struggle to get daily visitors, links and the occasional comment. They feel as if they haven’t progressed further than a few small steps from where they were right back when they started from scratch.

The most common cause of the above situation is blogging on auto-pilot. If you write certain types of posts and try certain promotional methods which don’t start working over, say, one month, it’s time to change tactics: change your content, change your post frequency, change your promotional methods, change your theme — keep experimenting until you find a combination that works.

If a particular approach hasn’t worked over an extended period of time, you’re not going to wake up one day and find that everything has fallen into place. Even if your new approach is not an improvement, you’re no worse off than when you started. As you experiment, you can discard the options that don’t work and move ever-closer to your most rewarding approach to blogging.

None of the above can take place without examination, though. If you don’t find the courage to acknowledge “This isn’t working as well as it should be,” you can’t change anything. You’re confined to repeating an unrewarding pattern of behaviors.

Though the above discussion has revolved mainly around a worst-case scenario I would hope only a minority of readers will relate to, I do think most of us could improve with examination — what I’ve previously called blogging consciously.

Here’s an unusual recommendation: part of every effective blogging routine should involve doing nothing.

For one hour a week or once every two weeks, sit in a quiet place either alone with your thoughts or accompanied by a pen and paper and examine the following:

Your content. Does it seem to resonate with your readers? If not, you might need to re-evaluate what value means for your target audience.
Your efforts to reach out. How are new visitors finding their way to your blog? Do you need to create more entry-points to your blog?
Future planning. What types of posts are you going to write in the next week or so?
Past review. Look back on the time since you last sat down to evaluate your habits. What worked? What didn’t? Should you keep doing what you were doing, or do some things need to change?
Do you feel like you wasted time? Where are your time leaks? Can you cut them out?
Time spent vs. rewards. What parts of your routine are taking up time without yielding significant rewards? Could you minimize or eliminate these parts of your routine?
Long-term thinking. Where do you want your blog to be in a year? Where do you want to be as a blogger? Thinking long-term will help you work out what’s truly important. Things that seem vital now might not matter much in a year or so. Are you on track to achieve your long-term plans?
Is it fun? A well-oiled and super-effective blogging routine won’t be sustainable if it’s not fun. In fact, an imperfect routine is preferable to one that makes you feel like blogging is a chore.

You’ll never be able to affect change if you don’t realize change is needed. You can’t realize change is needed unless you take the time to think, examine and evaluate.

While I don’t pretend to be a Babauta, or a Pavlina, or an Oprah, I can’t resist making one final point: one of the best habits I’ve developed over the last few months is to sit down for an hour or so each week and examine and evaluate my life in this way. If blogging on autopilot is bad, living on autopilot is far worse. You can’t create your best life if you don’t know what best means for you.

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19 Comments, Comment or Ping

Mark

Hi Skellie - I would like to add that sometimes, no matter how hard it might be, you just have to cut your losses and think about selling your site, and starting a new one. (Which is exactly where I find myself these days.)

Feb 17th, 2008
Clay Collins | The Growing Life

Yo Skellie, on a somewhat related note, I’m wondering what process you go through before actually publishing an individual post. Do you save it as a draft and then have others look over it? Or do you read it over, cross your fingers, and then hit publish? A final option, I guess, would be revising the post here and there over the few days following the publication of the post, but by the the RSS feed has already gone out (right?)

Thanks!
Clay

Feb 17th, 2008
skellie

@ Mark: I agree. I think it’s worth going through these five steps first, but if you still come up short or, most importantly, find that you’re not enjoying blogging, then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling and moving on.

@ Clay: I probably don’t review as much as I should. Usually I write posts on a Friday and future-publish them during the week. Once I’ve written and re-read them once to check for spelling mistakes I usually send them down the chute ready to be published. There are little mistakes here and there but I don’t think you can be obsessive about it.

Feb 17th, 2008
Mrs. Micah

@Mark, that makes sense. I’ve had a number of informal blogs over the years and just couldn’t stick with any of them for whatever reasons. This one is different and I have passion for it. But the others I just stopped pushing at. It’s hard to begin every post with an apology for not having posted earlier or to try to make myself care when I don’t…. fortunately I do care.

Good luck with your new site, Mark!

Feb 17th, 2008
Pat

A great post, Skellie. One thing that I read on another blog recently was this:

“Be mindful of the link between present action and desired future outcome. Ask yourself: if I repeat today’s actions 365 times, will I be where I want to be in a year?”

Mindfulness = conscious blogging. So I have tried to use this as inspiration to be more productive. To sit down and generate lots of good post idea, maybe type up a truly value-packed post, or whatever. Doing stuff that’s worthwhile, instead of just wasting time. It sort of goes back to that whole 80/20 rule that Skellie has been talking about recently on Anywired.

I had 2 things of note happen this week: one, I sold my first eBook, and then followed up with the customer via email to try and make sure that they are satisfied with the product. The second thing is that someone contacted me about possible freelance work and writing some articles for his website. I’m pretty excited about that possibility, but it hasn’t gone anywhere as of yet.

Your second point up above is to examine entry points to our blog. I’m seriously sick of banging my head against a wall and I’m now considering returning to the volume blogging approach to try and build traffic through Google searches. I am currently getting about 100 uniques from Google per day, and that is the vast majority of my traffic. I just can’t seem to find another angle that produces meaningful results in my niche.

Thanks, Skellie, for the reminder to be mindful.

Feb 17th, 2008
Oscar Valdes

As a startup blogger, these are great tips. I”m still trying to get a voice cause the theme is there, I just have to make sure that’s what readers are interested in. I’d love to read comments from readers telling me what they like or what they don’t.

Feb 17th, 2008
Ben

Hey Skellie, great post, and really great site! This is the kind of stuff that all newb bloggers like myself should be reading. Drawing on the experience of others has really helped me get past some of the harder parts of starting to write. Keep up the great work!

“The wise mans learns from other’s mistakes; a fool learns from his own.”

Ben

Feb 17th, 2008
Michael Martine

If a particular approach hasn’t worked over an extended period of time, you’re not going to wake up one day and find that everything has fallen into place.

Absolutely. If you don’t take time to plan and think, you will not plan effectively for long-term success, something I feel is important. Everything you do is a seed planted — what will it grow up to be in the long run?

People who dish out blogging advice tend to make things worse, because many of them present their advice as though it were a set of rules to be followed (by no means am I suggesting that you do, Skellie). Success comes from much more than just following rules. More often success comes from breaking them or at least reinterpreting them in a fresh way. A blogger’s ability to do this is directly related to what you’re suggesting, Skellie. Nice wrap-up to the series!

Feb 18th, 2008
ntas

Skellie as a blogging rookie I must say in the blog’s first days its hard to know where you are going wrong..is it the quality of the content or the establishing of quality entry points. What do you think of a blog having a landing page (like problogger.net) that showcases sections and features of a blog than a conventional top to bottom blog, does this help in getting the visitor to stay some more?

Feb 18th, 2008
Alfa King

@ Skellie: Fully agree. Although it might appear obvious to some these are things we tend to either forget or ignore. There’s no better way than to constantly question yourself and the things you do. Learning from experience and taking it from there for a brighter outlook is all that makes the difference.

@Ben, in my humble opinion, your last sentence-quote doesn’t seem appropriate. I don’t think Skellie’s point was to make “fool” of her readers. Examining your work, tracing out and correcting your own mistakes do not necessarily make of you a “fool”. Did I get you wrong?

Feb 19th, 2008
JD

Nice insights!

I’m a fan of reflection (My routine is Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Reflection)

I agree that knowing what you want and enjoying the process are key. I think it’s the full meal deal — your process, your product (blog), your audience, and the ambiance.

I think the ambiance is a a combination of:
1. Your promise in the blog (get smarter, blog better, … etc.)
2. The culture you establish (based on your values)
3. The like minds you attract (opposites attract, but similarities bind)

I do think that knowing your ROI against your purpose is important. For example, if I measured my one blog in terms of raw readership and interaction, it’s insignificant. On the other hand, I actually use it to scale myself and share reusable nuggets of insight for my circle of mentees. On my other blog, the readership is substantially higher, but I don’t get a lot of comments. Instead, I get a lot of behind the scenes thank you letters from inside and outside the company.

The “why” behind your blog is probably the single most important question to answer. It’s your staying power and guiding light.

Feb 19th, 2008
Mary Jaksch l GoodlifeZen

There are two point I want to pick out of Skellie’s lineup:

* Future Planning

My sense is that future planning is not just about planning the next posts, I think it’s about keeping the long-term development of your blog in site. This could involve thinking about revamping the site design, writing an Ebook to offer on your blog, starting a forum and so on. I think it’s good to write each post with the future in mind. This certainly keeps me working hard to produce posts that are of value because each posts draws new members to the community that I am ultimately building.

*Fun and passion

It think that’s the most important aspect. Why do it if we don’t enjoy it? The question is, how do I feed the passion? There are a lot of things I could say about this, some of which would make a good guest post
Let me just mention two points to do with changing one’s inner attitude to blogging in order to foster and feed passion:

1. Become an explorer, don’t just be a provider.

A provider offers information to others. That’s important and it’s useful. But it doesn’t set us alight. An explorer, however, takes her or his readers on a journey into the unknown and explores it together with them. That’s exciting - and excitement feeds passion.

2. See your writing as a practice, not as as profession.

Writing as a profession means focussing on making a living, gathering a readership and so on. But writing as a practice means that we write because we write. We write because it is our path in life. We write because we want to become the best writer we can be. We write because — a writer writes.

Feb 20th, 2008
mac

I love the idea of sitting alone in a quiet place with a notebook and a pen, then start thinking how to improve your blog. Sometimes the minds need a very quiet and peaceful environment just to realize that there’s something missing and need to be taking care of. Its amazing how many ideas will flying towards us at that time.

Mar 2nd, 2008
Fight Videos

Hi, you are offering a very goof insight of what bloggers should do and aware about. I agree that every blogger must research about what they blog about and keep updating the knowledge in blogging world.

May 13th, 2008
space code

Sometimes i get ideas on what to write in my head but it doesn’t really look nice on paper. But sometimes i don’t hv time to review so it get published.

May 21st, 2008
rake

Well done man, you really something! bloggers should follow your tips to make more research on their blog. Thanks, nice tips!

May 21st, 2008