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Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

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Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#51

Post by lancewiggs »

mol2103 wrote: post #19
kgtm wrote: post #5

95% of blogs are abandoned for the same reason 95% of projects never materialize, which in fact is the same reason 95% of life changes remain new year resolutions: Procrastination . The Postary announcement states: Postary - the simplest way to share posts with no strings attached, no obligations and no expectations. Postary reduces the Blog Lifecycle down to step four: if you are inspired to say something, then just…

Thanks for the feedback. We did this in 8-10 hours - we left a lot out :) The difference I guess is that we tried to create a blogging service that isn't a blog you need to maintain to feel good about.

I agree on the Twitter thing - open this up to anyone, let them grab a login with Twitter if they want, have a secret admin url if they want or have no editing ability at all - if they want.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#52

Post by matwood »

LargeWu wrote: post #3

Because writing well is really hard, and people don't realize that before they start.

Not only is good writing hard, but technical writing is even harder. I have a blog with a few articles on technical topics, but it takes a lot of time to write, edit, and make sure everything is correct. To put something up at the quality level I want ends up taking too much time and interfering with working on my projects.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#53

Post by guga31bb »

mol2103 wrote: post #48
cbs wrote: post #22

I like this idea, I've had a thing or two I wanted to write on, but didn't want to setup a blog. I've actually thought of building something similar myself. So, excited about this website, I clicked on "Write a post". Oh, you want to tie to my twitter account. Nevermind.

Why not connect your Twitter account? We won't post anything on your behalf...perhaps we should have made that clearer :/

I neither have nor want a Twitter account, but even if I did, there's no reason to want to link it to this service.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#54

Post by chipsy »

Definitely piqued my interest. I like that it works with Twitter, since it's an obvious "share point." But with this type of system people should have the option of posting their work anonymously.

The other thing I think this type of system should do is to aggregate the content. Encourage tagging and referencing of posts throughout the system, rather than siloing to a single author, and find ways to rank the content. Youtube is a good model. Rationale as follows:

I am often inspired on the spur of the moment to write detailed comments of sizes between a few paragraphs to the length of a short essay. And yet I know that most comments end up buried forever in an old discussion thread, never seeing the light of day again, regardless of their value.

So my thinking is that if we had a system that blurs "comments" and "articles" and tried to facilitate a discussion curated over years instead of hours, more value could be captured.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#55

Post by personlurking »

I've been blogging for 3.5 years on informational topics, which is to say I share what I learn in my own research on certain topics.

My main blog, which I've had the longest, has 500K hits, with an average of between 12K-16K per month. Am I happy with that? Sure, but it's not a money-maker. From what I've read, one needs to attract upwards of 100K visitors/month to be able to make some money from it. Currently, 130 people subscribe to my main (Wordpress) blog, though I don't believe WP offered the 'subscribe' widget the entire time I've been with them.

In the meantime, I've used the main blog's template, topic-wise, to create around 10 other blogs on other subjects. I eventually got burnt out and consolidated to 3 but then I deleted the least popular and stopped updating the second to last.

At my height, which I sustained for around 3 years, I was posting between one and two posts per day. For the main blog, I also made cards to hand out and tees to sell.

What I essentially did the majority of my time is curation and curation is a lot easier (if you know how to do it) than coming up with original content, which is what I've been doing with the main blog for most of 2011 when I switched gears. 'Coincidentally', this is also when many readers said bye-bye.

People I share links with, who blog on the same topic, usually write personal blogs and a few of them get 20-50 comments with every post. I, on the other hand, am lucky if I get 2-3. Basically, I get more hits but less comments.

All in all, I see my retirement from blogging in the near future because I feel I've mastered the topic (culture, by the way). It is said that it takes 8000-10000 hours of study to become an expert on something (a mark which I passed a few years back). The only problem is I'm a generalist at heart.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#56

Post by krobertson »

kgtm wrote: post #5

95% of blogs are abandoned for the same reason 95% of projects never materialize, which in fact is the same reason 95% of life changes remain new year resolutions: Procrastination . The Postary announcement states: Postary - the simplest way to share posts with no strings attached, no obligations and no expectations. Postary reduces the Blog Lifecycle down to step four: if you are inspired to say something, then just…

I agree. I was going to try it out, but wasn't interested in linking my Twitter account without knowing how it did what it says it does.

Needs more explanation on what the service does, perhaps a tour. Let me see how it works then if I want it, I'll link with Twitter.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#57

Post by reinhardt »

bad_user wrote: post #46
jonnathanson wrote: post #36

Very spot-on description of the mania-to-blah mindset that does in 95% of blogs. I'd also add to the mix: 1) Unrealistic Expectations. Most people have no idea what "success" really looks like for a blog. They assume that, if six months have gone by and they're not getting 100,000+ followers, they've failed. Another unrealistic expectation is what I'd call an overly generous self-assessment: the blogger in question o…

I disagree with the 90% / 10% thing. I was a very active blogger in my native language at some point, but I had only like 50 subscribers and maybe 300 page views in a good week. I then switched to English and wrote only a dozen of articles or so. One of them was hard to write, basically a HOW-TO article who's implementation I had to write and test before I wrote the article. I also work full-time for a living and it…

Strange, you bring up the fact that you switched to English and then completely ignore it as a potential factor in the conclusion.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#59

Post by prawn »

This was one of my smaller ideas - the ease of Posterous combined with the single-designed-page feel of about.me (and others like it). For a long time, I was looking for somewhere suitable to write up a restaurant review or talk about a movie or share something else, without committing to a full-scale blog.

No next or previous post buttons, probably no comments, just a title and body. Then a pool of photos/themes to present your information nicely. No feeling of abandonment or fear of commitment.

Not sure without further thought how this could be taken to the next level, but it's at least a nice side-project worth trying.

Re: Why are 95% of blogs abandoned?

#60

Post by jseliger »

jonnathanson wrote: post #36

Very spot-on description of the mania-to-blah mindset that does in 95% of blogs. I'd also add to the mix: 1) Unrealistic Expectations. Most people have no idea what "success" really looks like for a blog. They assume that, if six months have gone by and they're not getting 100,000+ followers, they've failed. Another unrealistic expectation is what I'd call an overly generous self-assessment: the blogger in question o…

2) Lack of Patience. Building a successful following is rarely an overnight journey. Some blogs take years to find their footing, and years more to find their audiences.

I would add one more point: most people don't fundamentally have a writer's disposition. Writing is hard (if it weren't, we wouldn't have so many professional writers, books on writing, and classes on writing). Having something to say and the means to say it is hard. Having something to say, the means to say it, and the desire to write it is even harder. And so on.

I appear to have that disposition, to the point where I wrote about it some here: http://jseliger.com/2011/02/26/on-blogging-altruistically-or... and wrote about why most people probably drift to Twitter and Facebook: they're easier. If you're not fundamentally blogging for yourself, and because you want to write regularly, you're probably not going to "make" it, for whatever value of "make" you might use.

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