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Is It Time To Give Up Blogging?

By on July 5, 2016
Is It Time To Give Up Blogging? - Writer's Life.org

For a while now, we have seen a lot of advice for writers suggesting that consistently write blogs alongside your creative work is imperative. A blog raises your profile, builds your audience and allows you to connect with a wider range of people. It gives you a better internet presence, shows your fans that you care, and is an excellent way to market your upcoming work and let your audience know what you are up to next.

Or so we thought…

There has been a rumour of late that blogging may not be all it is cracked up to be. Not only do many writers struggle with the idea of creating and maintaining a blog (particularly if they are only used to focusing on creative work), but also the effectiveness of blogging to help build on your success as a writer is now being debated.

So is it time to give up blogging? Is the blogging market saturated? Is it too late to jump on the bandwagon?

Not necessarily.

However, with more competition and new blogs appearing every day, it is more important than ever to understand how to create a successful blog, one that compliments your other writing, one that doesn’t distract you from your main focus, and one that is an effective use of your time. So how do you ensure your blog is not a waste of your energy and resources?

Make sure your blog keeps readers coming back for more.

The most important part of creating a blog is ensuring that it contains dynamic content. You can’t simply churn out tired old content, or content that isn’t of any interest to your target readers. Your blog needs to be thoughtful, it needs to have a theme, a unique point of interest that makes it stand out from the crowd, and enticing, exciting, interesting content that makes readers keep coming back for more.

The problem with this, of course, is that it therefore requires even more time and effort. If you are not willing to put that in then your blog is of no use. Think how much time and effort you put into your creative writing. You agonise over every sentence, every word. While you must be-able to find a balance with your blog (you need to create consistent content after all) you should carefully plan each post, find your blogging ‘voice’ and use it to connect with your readers on an emotional level.

Many authors may think that having an author website is enough. While creating a static website to tell your readers about yourself and to use as a platform to showcase your work is useful, a website is not likely to be somewhere your fans will return to time and time again unless there is a blog connected to it which provides fresh new content each and every time they visit.

But what about social media, can’t we simply use this instead?

Social media is a great way to communicate with your audience, however, you can’t provide the same level of depth as you can in a blog, and perhaps the most important point to remember is that your social media accounts don’t actually belong to you.

You may build up a great following on social media but if you were to lose access or the platform was suddenly retracted, you immediately lose all these followers. By blogging you can build up an email list of people who are interested in what you have to say. That list is yours and you can use it to communicate with your fans and readers whenever you like. Use social media to promote your blogs by all means, but don’t simply rely on it as your only form of communicating with your readers.

In order to create a successful, effective blog you need to put the effort in, plain and simple. You also need to ensure you don’t fall into the following common traps:

Talk about yourself all the time - blogs need to be interesting, funny, informative, and relevant. By all means pepper your blog with information about what is going on with you, upcoming book tours, new releases etc. But if it’s all ‘me,me, me’ even your biggest fans will struggle to maintain interest.

It’s difficult to read - your tone should be warm, friendly and conversational for the most part. It is also important to think about the design of your blog. If it is too cluttered or not user friendly then people will struggle to read it and eventually give up altogether.

You don’t try to market it - no one is going to find your blog if you don’t put it out there. Write consistently, share links across your social media platforms, learn the basics of SEO, use every possible method you can think of to make your blog visible.

Writing a successful blog means you have to work consistently. Even when you have built up a following you must continue to work at it, to improve your content, to build your audience. Blogging is certainly not dead, but it has upped its game and, therefore, so must you.

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

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