First and foremost, to all professional bloggers who post daily, even multiple times in a day, I applaud you. It takes concentration and effort to form an informative, info-rich post. Doing it every day definitely was not easy, especially having to schedule a few in advance for days I would be incapacitated, although I think my two posts I wrote for the weekend were better quality than my mid-week posts.
The biggest struggles I encountered were balancing adding to the conversation and providing interactive information. I can write opinionated jargon about stuff, or I can lay out what others are saying. When it comes to combining the two to provide a relevant and fascinating post, it takes a lot of focus. I think if I had better laid out what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, and where I wanted to incorporate it in my post, some of my postings may have been less cluttered and opinionated. Also, specifically for my collaboration series, I had a hard time finding links and media to add to it. Perhaps I’m not yet proficient at searching the archives of Google to effectively locate and draw out sources to add to my thoughts. At that point, maybe I should have reevaluated the direction I wanted to take with the series. I really liked the idea though, so I tried to make it work regardless.
Through this past week’s process, I learned a few hopefully valuable things:
- I learned the importance of working ahead. For most of the week I was 1-2 posts ahead of what was to be published that day. That let me feel a cushion of comfort that a pressing deadline would have taken away. Additionally, being a post or two ahead gave me time to look over and see if there was anything I needed to change before posting it.
- By looking at my stats I think that there’s a good correlation between immediately relevant posts and number of views. I could write a thoughtful, insightful and provocative piece on how MySpace was such a crucial component of bands gaining fans, but because no one cares about MySpace it probably won’t get much attention. My posts that received the highest number of visitors were “Twitter Tuesday: Miley Cyrus” and “The Fight for Internet Radio Supremacy”. Both of these added context to an ongoing conversation. Miley is getting naked and licking sledgehammers and iRadio just came out. They’re both conversations being talked about.
- Stay involved! This may be something partially learned in hindsight. If I follow the right people, and promote where people are already looking (like my personal Facebook account), then I will have a larger audience at least in the vicinity of the link to my blog. I had a friend text me this week saying he liked my blog. I had no idea he even knew about it. It was through plugging my twitter account and blog on my Facebook and random, personal twitter account that he must have saw it. If I keep up with contributing to social media, as well as being aware of what others are posting, I will probably see my audience grow.
All in all, it was a good experience. Now I don’t think posting two times a week will seem daunting. Good promotion and a balance of opinion and information will make my blog much better. Also, I think I want to make Twitter Tuesday a weekly thing. Initially I didn’t know if it was interesting enough for a weekly thing, but it generated twice as many visitors as my other biggest post. If people want to read about celebrities tweeting stuff then I will oblige and give it to them.
Stay tuned for a more composed and more exciting blog!
Thanks for reading.
ryanglaspell 