Your blog, a place to transcribe your thoughts, ideas, helpful hints and a place for readers to express their thoughts in comments. New bloggers start with the greatest intentions – choosing a topic that is popular but not overdone. Subject areas that are easy to write about, with exceptional headlines & content and adding a bit of their own flair to the each article to separate their blog from the crowd. At first, blogs do not have much traffic so trying different with the blog is a good idea to help find your audience and what keeps them coming back. As you are building an audience through promoting your blog, the focus is on the writing as well as new avenues to reach new readers and get noticed. As you get into a good rhythm and readers start to comment on the articles, there is a whole lot of inspiration to pump out as much content as your fingers will transcribe on the keyboard. You stay true to the topic area and slowly the blog gets some traffic which is generally around the 4-6 month mark. It as that this stage where the blog starts to suffer an identity crisis as you start to chase the numbers and write articles that are off topic and written purely with the number of opens and retweets and not the audience who is expecting on-topic information but now is feeling left at the alter wondering what is going on with the sudden erratic articles.
How to Cure Your Blogs Identity Crisis
1. Revisit the Purpose of the Blog. Why are you blogging? Now that you have gotten your feet wet and have been blogging for a bit and feel the need to stray from your topic, revisit the purpose of the blog. This may have changed from when you started or just needed to be focused upon again to get the blog back on track.
2.Revisit Goals of Blog. Take a look at the goals you set for the blog and see if you are on track to meeting or exceeding those goals and stick to that path. Yes we all want our blogs to get maximum exposure but if the blog is off topic or is not getting the desired result from the readers, it is pretty much wasting everyone’s time.
3. Is Niche still Viable? You identified your niche and were hoping to move right along and build traffic within this niche but now may be finding that this is not working as well as you would have liked. This happens but trying to jump in and just starting to write different types of articles without without first outlining why you are changing, what the changes will mean to the blog leaves your readers confused and ultimately have them not return.
4. Analyze Traffic Sources. Is your target market really where you are promoting? Are you able to dedicate a considerable amount of time on some of the sites such as Twitter where this is not a tweet your article and run off to the next social networking site. Look at where your target audience is and before you jump into there, determine if it fits your lifestyle and time. Maybe a forum would work better or an article marketing site where the time investment is lighter.
5. Overcome Writers Block. Writer’s block is another factor to consider when your blog is suffering an identity crisis. If you are struggling to stay on topic or to even find topics to write about, while it is inviting to stray and find maybe something that is popular or will get a post up, resist the temptation to stray.
6. Refer to Keyword List. You of course researched keywords and core keyword phrases when you were considering starting the blog and building your website so refer back to these keywords. This not only keeps your blog on topic but also keeps you focused and increases your page rankings. Keywords should be the basis of the blog theme/topic and continuously referred back to and expanded upon.
Your blog is a yours and writing what you want when you want is a great attitude until you realize that the inconsistency in traffic and subscribers is attributed to the blog being all over the place and really suffering from an identity crisis. Blogging is not easy and takes a big effort and commitment to maintain as it is more than writing pushing out the articles – understanding what your audience wants and expects and giving them what they want is a big part of it but also being responsible to the audience and to the blog itself by being consistent and not allowing your blog to suffer is what keeps the blog alive and not suffer a hangover and lead to the death of the blog.
The platform is now yours – what do you think? Has your blog suffered an identity crisis? How did you remedy it?
photo credit: FuzzyInk
