Airing Out My Blogging Shortcomings

December 12, 2007

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The other day Skellie asked, “Where are the holes in your leaky bucket?” trying to get readers to document what shortcomings they might have, or things they’d like to improve about their blogging. I’ve decided that I’d like to answer the question here.

Promoting BloggingNotes: this unfortunately, is a big one for me. I have periods where I’ll actually be pretty good about getting the word out and doing some promotion of BloggingNotes. But it never seems to be long term promotion. Things like Entrecard, and blogging forums draw some attention to the site, but some things tend to fall away, and here I am still stuck with fewer readers than I’d like. Not everything fails, though. BloggingZoom is still something that I believe strongly in for generating traffic to a site, and BN wouldn’t have a lot of the stats it does today if it hadn’t been for BZ.
Generating ideas for posts: when I started this site, I never intended it to have the amount of original content that it does, My original goal was to have the site act like an aggregator, pointing to all the cool stuff that other people wrote. I’m glad to say, though, that I’ve been able to generate enough (hopefully quality) content to make the site stand on it’s own. This isn’t to say that it hasn’t been a struggle at times, because it has. And some serious brainstorming sessions, along with the odd bit of sudden inspiration, and things have been okay. But that’s why I keep an editorial calendar running, so I can see what I’ve got coming up for the next week, and what sort of research I need to do, or who I might need to email to see if they’ll sit for an interview for the site (I’m working on that one now).

Those are really the two that stick out the most for me, and I’m working on getting through them. I want the site to succeed, and have said from the beginning that I wanted to do things the right way from the start, rather than trying to play catchup and fix things after they’ve broken.

It’s been much easier this way, believe me.

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