Do I need to decide what my blog is about?

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Permalink Reply by Sue on November 22, 2007 at 11:24pm

I think that how much you should adhere to certain formats depends very much on what your aims are for your blog as well as your topic. The extent to which you need to analyze and plan is proportionate to the ambitions you have e.g Are you happy with a smallish close readership, or aiming for a huge amount of visitors? Are you trying to reach a specific audience, want to be part of a particular group? Is your aim to teach or impart knowledge or information on a particular subject?

The more specific your aims the more you need to plan what you write what sort of format you are going to take and how we promote our blogs. You always need to temper this with the amount of enjoyment you are getting out of it though. If we are no longer enjoying what we are doing because it is becoming a chore, then maybe we should then review our aims - what we want is not necessarily what we need. The quality of our writing is bound to suffer if we are forcing ourselves to write in a way that is not natural to us. Then again we may just need a bit of a break or to blog less frequently for a while until motivation returns.

If you aim is writing for fun and you are having fun doing it I would say just go for it and carry on using your 'format', which could be no format at all. There are so many blogs telling us that we should be doing this that and the other. Keep in mind that pro-blogger type help blogs are usually aimed at a very small proportion of bloggers - those whose aim is to either make money, get to the front page of digg and develop a massive readership. Most of us just do it to enjoy and to develop a satisfying community of readers to interact with.

I should imaging quite a few people are questioning their blogging having to try to keep up with NaBloPoMo daily posting :-)

I was persuaded that in my move to Wordpress on my own domain, I should start again. I can still see the reasoning behind it but I have not got all my readers back, am not getting the same amount of visitors and although pagerank is not the be all and end all, the fact that I don't have one at all anymore does bother me a bit. Oh well having to make an effort to get some content into the new blog has meant that I have easily been keeping up with MaBloPoMo so the timing was good at least. I have also committed myself to writing about the move across to my own domain. All this has made me sit back and think about my own aims because with the move motivation has dropped a little.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra Hanks Bentoiton on November 23, 2007 at 4:04am

Since I write three professional, topic-focused blogs, my personal blog is a release valve for all the stuff I have left when I've published 1500 to 2000 words or so, but am not feeling done. I'm all over the place on Paradise Preoccupied, and I know it. I also know that this frustrates some readers who are deeply interested in adoption, for example, but could care less about island life ... both hot topics with me.

I'm thinking about starting another blog in January, one with a point that I will aim for as I write there in hopes of taking some of my advocacy to greater heights. We'll see about that.

Here are links to my pro blogs, if anyone is interested:

http://international.adoptionblogs.com/
http://older-parent.adoptionblogs.com/
http://news.adoptionblogs.com/index.php

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