Are you a goldfish blogger?

Best Blogger Tips

Sunday 9 August 2009

I have had cause to think a lot lately about what makes a successful blog and I have decided that it comes down to one thing – consistency. Whether yours is a blog about fishing, quilting, or playing poker, (or a blog about gambling for fabrics while fishing) and regardless of whether it is political, social, theological, or just to make (or to try and make) people laugh, it will stand or fall on its consistency (both quality and quantity, or should I say regularity).

Another thing to note about blogs, or more specifically about blog readers (myself included) is that they are like goldfish – you have ten seconds of memory time before they forget you forever (and even when you catch them, they rarely stay for more than two minutes – and that is not a bad thing, especially for blogs like mine).

So for these reasons, among others, I have decided to streamline my blog output. Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of stuff posted that won’t make any difference to your life if you miss it, and even the stuff I do post should not take you any longer than 30 seconds to digest, but here are my new plans:

  • I am only going to blog Monday to Friday, once per day;
  • Mondays will hopefully be a chiasmus, a comeback, or a quote (in that order of preference);
  • Tuesdays a funny picture of some type
  • The Wednesday word will continue to be on, surprise surprise, Wednesdays;
  • Thursday will be a random comment day (if I have one) or perhaps a blog series (I have one on ‘Juries behaving badly’ coming up);
  • My ‘Pointless Post-it Notes’ will remain on Fridays.
So what do you think? Does consistency make or break a blog? Do you enjoy being both a goldfish blogger and a goldfish reader (like I do)? Or did you fail to make it to the end of this unusually long blog post?

3 comments :

Di said...

You're so right, Andrew. With around 130 blogs loaded into my Google Reader I'm definitely a goldfish reader - have to be! I'm also becoming more of a goldfish blogger - I think there are many people around like me.

(Now, when is that bub of yours expected? Is all going well with you both?)

Andrew said...

Wow - 130 blogs in google reader. I thought I was doing well on 62.

(He was expected last week, but we think he has found the snooze button. Apart from that all is going well.)

Nathan said...

I've got a two or three hundred blogs in my reader - including yours.

I'm with you on the importance of consistency.

And I thoroughly enjoy your regular explorations of language and your post it notes. Which will feature in a post on my blog sometime in the near future.

I think I'm a goldfish commenter - I make comments in a discussion but often get distracted and don't come back to see what's going on until it's all over.

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