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

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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:

1. Content with a lack of significance for its target audience.
2. A lack of diverse entry points to the site.
3. An un-defined or vaguely defined target audience.
4. Readers perceive your blog as low quality, even when it’s not.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. Future planning. What types of posts are you going to write in the next week or so?
4. 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?
5. Do you feel like you wasted time? Where are your time leaks? Can you cut them out?
6. 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?
7. 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?
8. 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.