How Blogging Can Drive You Batty

Over a year ago, Google announced they would be supporting the Author tag.  At the time, Google led us to believe this was a new feature added to their search results that would display the author’s avatar next to their post, and help bloggers gain a reputation and credibility.  It wasn’t long after that we discovered Rel=”Author” would be factored into the Google Algorithm as well. And now 16 months later, this is still one of the most talked about topics in the SEO industry.  This is just a small part of the struggle that is associated with owning and maintaining a successful blog.

Unless someone already has a successful blog, they probably don’t understand the work or the effort involved in building one from the ground up. When it comes to owning a successful blog, there is only one step that has a straight-forward guide, and that is the famous WordPress 5 minute install, which is really just making the overall mission harder by adding to the competition. According to Pingdom, there are over 70 million WordPress websites on the Internet, and this is just one type of blog.  You’re going to need to choose either a really unique topic that you are passionate about, or have a lot of experience with, or you can find your niche industry and attempt to dominate it. Deciding on your blog’s topic is just the first frustration of many when it comes to owning a blog. 

Now that you have WordPress installed, spent a few hours (or days) playing with themes, plugins, you’ve gotten all of your SEO items tweaked, and you finally have a general idea or topic to write about, now it’s time to get writing. A blog without fresh and updated content is just a waste of space and another number to add to the amount of websites out on the Internet that nobody reads or bothers to visit. The important thing to remember is consistency. You need to offer high quality, fresh content to your readers, and do it often. Give them a reason to come back everyday.

Let’s take a newly launched tech-product for example:  If Engadget, Gizmodo, or CNET decided to not write about the Samsung Chromebook after it’s recent media release, and decided to let another techie site cover the product’s spec’s, then these three big tech sites would not be as successful as they are today. By not writing about the Chromebook, they would be losing potential visitors every time someone searched for the “Samsung Chromebook.”

There are hundreds of authors out there that could set-up a blog and start writing, but how long will they be able to maintain the blog AND write for that website every day? How long will they continue to publish updates on that topic before they wear themselves out?   One great solution that most bloggers have learned to utilize to avoid getting burnt out (and still staying fresh with content) is guest bloggers.

Guest blogging is nothing new, and has helped grow a number of blogs as well as bloggers.  For the most part, it is a win-win situation, where a blogger promotes a website, a website promotes a blogger, and a website owner gets content without having to write it themselves.

However, guest blogging presents its own issues. The problem is guest blogging is that you are relying on someone else to grow your website.  Any website owner who has leaned on a guest blogger at some point knows that many things could go wrong.  Guest bloggers have opinions, and sometimes their writing voice may be vastly different from what you have been writing. Sometimes it’s good to have diversity on your blog and reach out to different audiences. However, having so many different views or voices on your website could cause confusion to your regular, loyal readers.

Another major issue is dependability; As a blog owner needing content, you are forced to rely on the guest blogger actually following through with their offer to deliver – on time or at all. Not only does everything need to be more planned out when working with an outside writer, if not planned or scheduled correctly,   We’ll let’s just say if you are a new to allowing guest bloggers on your website, or you are working with a “new” guest blogger, be sure to have some sort of backup content planned.

Owning and maintain a large blog is a full time job, and shouldn’t be tackled half-heartedly. It takes a lot of planning, time, and discipline to continuously have fresh, valuable content published daily. These are just some of the major issues that will drive you Batty.

CopyPress

October 23, 2012 (Updated: February 9, 2023)