You Are Only As Good As Your Last Blog Post

Blogging December 2, 2009 11 Comments @niallharbison

You may think that the hardest part of creating an audience and building community is getting the people to your site but it is actually harder to keep people interested and I want to show you just how easy it is to lose people no matter how big a fan they are. The problem is that people have a huge amount of choice online and there time is precious so you need to stay on top of your game in order to keep all your readers happy. The two following examples draw on my own personal reading of blogs…

Example 1

I used to read Gary Vaynerchuk every single day of the week and I followed his videos religiously. He gave great insights in to social media and how to leverage it for your business. What drew me in was that he was the small guy taking on big business through the web and winning. I stopped reading recently enough and it was a combination of feeling that I was getting sold stuff constantly (the book etc) and then the last straw was the picture above. I hadn’t been on the blog in about a month and when I did click through I saw that picture and it just made me think “Really? Sending books to Africa and then having a clearly staged photo shoot with the kids looking at the book?” I left straight away and vowed not to return. I know it was probably well intended and there was a good story behind it but I didn’t like what I saw and made my mind up in an instant not to go back.

Example 2

Fidel Castro Dead I can’t believe I am going to share this on a business blog but I used to read Perez Hilton. For those of you not familiar with Perez he is one of the biggest bloggers in the world and focuses on celebrity. His blog is very trashy but also surprisingly addictive with over 10 million readers enjoying his daily posts about breaking news in Hollywood. I used to be one of the 10 million who were hooked until I felt he started making a couple of stories up. Again I had started to drift away when one day I popped in to catch up on the latest celebrity news but found news about Cuban leader Fidel Castro being apparently dead. The story of course turned out to be false and I just didn’t appreciate Hilton tyring to get in to news reporting which he clearly has no idea about and as a result I have not been back since. Misleading so many people about something as important was wrong in my opinion and as a result I lost confidence in the site.

Conclusion

Every single one of us is capable of writing posts, tweets or updates that will piss people off. I even did it here last week with a story about Tiger Woods that people took offense to thinking I had just written it to get search engine traffic. Readers are very fickle. You could write 100 amazing posts but write one that annoys them and just like me in the examples above they’ll be gone!

What can you do to combat this? Well you need to go with your gut most of the time because people like reading opinionated content. You should always check that your facts are right because you have a moral responsability to do that and if you do annoy a certain group of people with your content you can always talk to them. Ask them why it annoyed them so much.

Perhaps the best advice I can give is when you go to hit that Publish or send button think about it long and hard. Just remember that the content you publish can never be hidden again. Once it is out there it will be a representation of you for as long as we have the internet!

Comments

http://www.famefoundry.com FFcommunicator

We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to interview Gary Vaynerchuk at Fame Foundry. Listen to what Gary Vee says about social media.
http://www.famefoundry.com/1314/garyvaynerchuk

@FFcommunicator
Fame Foundry
http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

“just didnâ€™t appreciate Hilton tyring to get in to news reporting which he clearly has no idea about”

and

Perhaps the best advice I can give is when you go to hit that Publish or send button think about it long and hard. Just remember that the content you publish can never be hidden again. Once it is out there it will be a representation of you for as long as we have the internet!

speak for themselves. Stick to what you’re good at.

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Thats the thing. Sometimes you get it wrong like I did possibly with Tiger Woods story. 50% saying loved it but 50% annoyed by it. I try to tie in real life with social media but from feedback most people seem to prefer social media full stop. The most important is that if you do Feck up and annoy people is to go and learn from it and improve

http://thisiswhatido.org Darragh

I’d add in – know what people are coming to you for and deliver it, unless that doesn’t matter to you. That’s why I’d be very hesitant about ever including personal opinion pieces on a company blog for example. I don’t go there for random stuff, I go there to find out what I want to find out about.

I don’t read any of the top blogs – mashable, rrw and the like, consistently. Just too much varied stuff that I’m not interested in. Instead (just like this post) I’ll cick into posts that look good on twitter or where I see it mentioned.
http://www.theinfopreneur.net TheInfoPreneur

Totally agree Niall, A site can’t rely on just one awesome post. Build on the last one and give value to your readers.
Granted you won’t always get it right, but as long as the great out-way the not so great, your on the right path

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah agreed that you just need to churn out as much good content as possible. That is the key. Not letting the odd bad one slip in is also important!

http://illuminate.typepad.com/creative-illumination Sean

Hi Niall

Seeing you visited my site I thought I’d return the favour!

You made some good points here – especially illustrating the example of the photo shoot in an African school. That would put me off as well.

There is an old saying “try to please everybody and you’ll please nobody”. People already suffer from writers block as it is when trying to maintain a blog. My personal opinion is that you need to write what you think feels right. If you stare at that Publish button too long and wonder if people are going to criticize your post you’ll be staring for a long time. That is paralysis by analysis.

Thanks for your blog – keep up the posts!
Sean

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

Yeah you are right Sean that sometimes you just have to say “fect it” and hit the publish button if if you are not sure if you are right or not. You will get a backlash but analyzing every post like you say will not get you anywhere either!

http://rosahayesonline.com Rosa

I often say that a blog can either make you or break you. This is a very good point and there are plenty of blogs that I quit reading over time. I stopped blogging for a little over a year and when I came back to those same blogs that I use to read I was like, really? I use to read that?

http://www.simplyzesty.com Niall Harbison

That is exactly the same thing I get Rosa! I suppose it is something simialr to TV and newspapers. When I was younger I used to read a thrashy newspaper called The Sun and now I wonder why the hell I ever did! I guess we just grow out of certain things!

Sidrah Zaheer Siddiqui

Great post. I could not agree more, absolutely.

You Are Only As Good As Your Last Blog Post

Example 1

Example 2

Conclusion

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