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The thing about blogging is that its easy. It is so damn easy it starts making you lose respect for it. I am sure you have come across people who ‘lose interest’ in blogging. Maybe you have too. Ever wondered why that happens? Webmasters don’t get bored of websites. And blogs are websites really, aren’t they? Only, they are websites that are very un-website-like.

Pre-made designs mean you don’t have to bother with your blog’s looks in as major a way as a ‘proper’ website does. Blogging platforms come packed to the gills with information architecture tools (archives, categories etc). Everything from editing content to publishing on to the server is automated. All a blogger needs to do is type and hit the enter key.

This is when it starts. A blogger faces the abominable block more often than a traditional webmaster does because blogging becomes ‘one thing’. Blogging has come to imply only writing. Writing with utter abandon on topics as varied as possible and as frequently as possible. Hence the assumption that a frequently-posted-to blog is the ideal to follow.

The way I see it, because the system (Blogger, Wordpress, whatever) takes care of everything, we forget the ‘everything’. At face value, a blog is a web page with bits of text arranged reverse-chronologically. I can’t help but imagine that people see their blogs as a page. We can call it the Front Page Syndrome (hey I kind of like that!).

Now it becomes easy to imagine why someone would lose interest in their blog. Wouldn’t you? If you saw your blog as a web page with inane and stale material of no consequence.

Now ask yourself this: Would you have lost interest in your blog if it had been a website with quality articles about things that matter to you and are useful to others. No na? This was a no-brainer really!

Another factor to take into consideration is that a webmaster is constantly involved in every aspect of his website’s maintenance and development. This perhaps keeps him from losing sight of issues that need attention and aspects that need improving (trust me on this, issues and aspects abound). He realises that something with this many issues can’t be abandoned and deserves attention.

Web 2.0 seems designed for what almost everyone calls fresh content. The popular definition of fresh is: Anything keyword/tag-rich posted in the last minute. Fresh content shows up and stays visible on feed aggregators for precious minutes while those posts that aren’t talking about what everyone else is, die without exposure.

But not really. It is a good idea to place your bets on actual people reading your blog. If you are taking the trouble of writing posts that are of value to people, then word-of-mouth will do your cause more good than search engine optimisation. Read this post on StevePavlina.com to see what I mean.

While a regularly updated blog is a nice idea, it is not a prerequisite for a successful blog. Old posts never die. They just go to archive-heaven. In any case, one can always drag them back by the permalink into front page limelight. As this post on pearsonified.com illustrates, featuring your best content on the front page is a good idea.

What matters is having a rich blog. The knowledge that your blog has a rich foundation, will fuel you more than any other consideration possibly could.

Posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 10:32 am and filed under blogging, writing.

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