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Getting Your Blog Up and Running

January 13th, 2010

Adam West - portrait smile

photo credit: el fedora - Holy Baffling Bloggers! It's Adam West!

By Matt Cook
Point.Click Media

Keeping up with your blog can be a daunting task. Many bloggers are hungry to get going and only a few short weeks into it realize that they’ve severely underestimated the work involved in keeping all portions of their website up to date. Our goal this week is to help those that may have lost a bit of that hunger and help make their lives a bit easier. Here are just a few common mistakes that bloggers tend to make that can often have them screaming uncle before they even really get going.

Sporadic Updates

Blogs don’t need to be updated constantly like a daily newspaper, but just remember that your updates are what keeps your readership coming back. Even if your website or blog only puts up a new entry on a monthly or bimonthly basis, that’s fine. Just make sure to keep updates at regular intervals to avoid the tumbleweed effect – where your readers see that nothing has happened in the 8 months since launch and they’ve moved on.

Broken Promises

People always tend to have big ideas and great ambitions to put forth the next big bonanza that will catch on like Facebook or YouTube. This leads to the blogger making more promises to their readers than a politician at a pep rally. The problem is they usually have no idea how to execute these ideas properly. This of course develops into a system that is born to fail. Successful blogs and websites don’t pop up overnight. They take a lot of time and a lot of effort. The best practice when first starting up your blog is to take it slow. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Start small and as you gain users you can expand from there. This way, you avoid making outlandish and over ambitious claims like “We’ll be following the President with live updates of all his bodily functions, 24/7!” before you wake up on the men’s room floor with a nasty gash from some lookalike that you followed into the third stall with your iPod.

Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel

Remember the 1960’s Batman series starring Adam West? Aside from being a delectable gooey batter of awesome and awful at the same time, it also had a way of drawing fans to the next episode with that famous catch phrase at the end of each show. The average attention span today is shorter than ever. No one has time to read what we all have to say. After all, everyone has a half hour of Facebook statuses to read so we can keep up to date on what the clown that sat behind you in 10th grade physics had for breakfast this morning. Priorities, right? Information overload can quickly tire your readers out. If you’ve got a big topic to cover, split it up into a series of posts. The effects are two-fold. First, you’re enticing your readers to return, and second it allows you to space your articles out over a period of time, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.

These are simply a few tricks that can help you get your blog or website off the ground. It’s important not to bite off more than you can chew when starting out, as your task list can quickly snowball into a giant boulder that not even Indiana Jones himself could escape. In any case, operating a successful website takes dedication.

If you’re currently overstocked on dedication and you’re looking for a place to put it, contact Point.Click Media.

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Posted in Tips and Tricks on January 13th, 2010

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