He’re’s a little secret, I’ve slowly and steadily been unsubscribing from SEO blogs for the past few months, and last week the total number of marketing blogs I read dropped below 10, and I think the time has come for an intervention. For a lot of you the time has come to ask yourselves does your blog suck … and what are you doing to change it?
What are your metrics for success? Is it traffic, page views, user engagement, links, comments, rss subscribers? It’s ok if one or two of them flatlines or drops, but if most of them have turned south, you have a problem.
What are you writing about? Are you writing about topics that are of interest to your community and staying on topic?
Are you engaging the community? Are you interacting with other people in comments? Are you engaging people on twitter, not just looking for retweets?
Are you being helpful? Are you writing tutorials teaching people how to do something? Are you taking questions from your community and paying it forward?
Are you publishing regularly? You don’t have to publish daily but you do have to publish often enough that people don’t forget you exist. Are you publishing at the right time of day when most of your community is in front of their computers to read it, or are you publishing today’s news at 9PM Pacific Standard time, when most of your community is long gone. That’s not news that’s ancient history.
Are you stepping outside of your comfort zone? Are you challenging the authorities in your space who are you think are wrong? Are you willing to take responsibility for those actions, realizing not everyone will agree with you?
Are you visually interesting? Are you using pictures? Not just for the sake of meeting a visual quota but good images that make a post better.
Are you Innovating? Are you evolving and improving how you do business, and are you trying new methods and techniques?
To put a fine point on it what are you doing to be interesting and worth reading?
If you don’t fix what’s broken now, don’t despair I’ve published a how to guide on how to shut down your blog 😉