The title is a slight twist on a Billy Idol song title… But, what I’m talking about here is the struggle for new bloggers to keep up the momentum when starting out.
Now, I don’t generally talk about blogging directly here, but when I saw ProBlogger Darren Rowse’s post When it Feels Like Nobody is Reading Your Blog this morning it resonated strongly with me, as I’d had this very conversation with my wife, Alli, last night with respect to her blog, ShiftedHR. She’s one of just a handful of HR bloggers in Australia and tackles a number of strategic issues from a management and best practice perspective - while messing with the status quo and sacred cows a little. It’s all very good writing - I would think so even if she wasn’t married to me.
Alli has been blogging a few weeks now, has picked up a small (<10) group of readers by RSS and has 3-5 hits a day on most days for her blog. She's feeling a little unloved and is considering pulling the plug. My advice was to work on, and get involved by commenting on HR blogs elsewhere. Her response was that she's too busy to be commenting, what with being a Mum, wife, successful manager, part-time college student and everything else that's going on in her head. I empathise, she is very busy, even in our house where the load is fairly well shared (I don't claim domestic perfection, but I do okay).
I really do want her to keep blogging, as it provides her a good outlet for her thoughts and a way to distribute the tacit knowledge she’s got in her head. If you’re facing the same hurdle over passion to continue your blog, I recommend Darren’s post.
Oh, and just for fun, here’s a link to a video of Billy Idol singing Dancing With Myself.
3 Comments
A few weeks? Ha ha - I didn’t start getting any decent hit numbers till about 6 MONTHS into blogging! Don’t be discouraged Alli! 2 years into blogging (and my blog isn’t a professional one … it’s fairly random) and I’ve managed to build up to about 550+ visits per day, but for quite a few months at the start I was hardly getting any visitors. Keep with it! All the writing you’re doing now is not going to waste - some of my most visited articles now are ones I wrote a year ago.
Your most important audience member should be yourself.
I think she should start off using the blog as way to capture information that is interesting to her. If she sees a new item, blog post or anything else on the web she should just post a link to it and say why it was interesting to her. Then she can find it easily and reuse it later.
Think of a blog as a personal knowledge managment tool.
Steve - I can only echo the comments that you and the other commentors have made.
Everyone has their own reasons for writing a blog and, like most people, I track how many visitors I get. I get about 30 visitors a day. But they are the right 30 visitors (apart from those who used “gratuitous nudity” and “exhibitionism” as google search terms). People who comment and interlink and all that good stuff.
Which makes me think this is an example of “do as you would be done by”. I want people to leave relevant, intelligent comments on blog. I want active readers. So I have to do that for other people. Otherwise it’s not going to work.
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