Blog Fail – 7 Ways to Prevent Your Blog From Going Under

People are not too keen on admitting failure. We want to see things succeed and prosper, and we want to know that it was our contributions that led to that success. Nevertheless, failure is an essential exercise. To not fail is to not have accomplished anything.

With that said, I will admit that this blog failed.

I hope that got your attention, so let me clarify. The blog as a whole did not fail, but a critical element did. It’s not necessarily bad that it failed as I learned some important lessons that I’m going to share.

So, what failed? In January, I introduced a new weekly series aimed at homepage improvement. In the initial post, I laid out a plan for the series and announced that it would occur every week.

That didn’t happen.

The first week, awesome. The second week, great. The third week, well, I got stuck traveling so I’ll push the series until next week and do two. The fourth week, where did all the time go? I need to do a new post. The fifth week, something’s not working.

I dedicated myself to a weekly series and couldn’t commit after two weeks. That is a blog fail.

Failure, as I was saying before, is important. It’s important to recognize mistakes and errors. Because it’s from those that you really learn.

Here’s what I learned.

1) Attitude

Attitude and mindset are the cornerstones of successful blogging. Developing the right attitude for blogging involves looking at the bigger picture. Why are you blogging? What is the goal? What do you hope to accomplish?

Doing a blog because everyone else is doing it is not the right attitude.

Doing a blog so that you can connect with a specific audience and convince them that you’re an expert in certain fields is the better attitude.

By seeing the larger picture, you can connect your blogging activities with the success of your organization. With that knowledge, you can begin to develop an overwhelmingly positive attitude for your blog. If you know it’s going to support what you’re doing, then you know it’s something you need to be doing.

2) Commit

This is the hardest part. Commitment is the action that results from attitude. Once you’ve decided to blog, you must commit to it. It’s not a one-time thing.

Blogging is actually a relationship-building activity. As you continue to blog, you gather an audience, connect with them, and share with them knowledge and information. And like any successful relationship, it involves commitment.

This is the area I failed spectacularly in with my weekly series. I built up anticipation for a weekly series, and committed myself to it, but ultimately failed to follow-through.

Failing to follow-through is the biggest mistake in commitment. And once you break commitment, it erodes your attitude and slowly turns you off of blogging. There are ways to build better, smarter and stronger commitments which I’ll delve into.

3) Research and Plan

If you’re going to blog, spend the time to do a little research. Is it a good idea? Who are you trying to communicate with? Are there other blogs out there doing the same thing?

These are important points of research and planning because it will determine your success later down the road. If no one cares about homepage re-design, then no one is going to read my weekly series. If no one is going to read it then I’m not going to see any results, and like failure of commitment, it erodes the mindset.

4) Brainstorm

Coming up with good ideas for a blog is tough. What do I write about? How do I write it? What am I trying to say?

These are hard questions to answer. But with some proper brainstorming tactics, you can think through it and let your mind put the pieces together.

For my weekly series, there really wasn’t that much brainstorming required to think of topics. The weekly series was the topic; I just had to keep it fresh. However, the weekly series is not the entire blog. I have to think about other posts and new topics to keep people interested.

Brainstorming for me is all about setting. I have to be alone with my thoughts in order to think through topics and ideas. I’ve produced some of my best ideas while running or taking a shower. The point is, you must develop the right brainstorming format for yourself. Does talking to other people help you generate ideas? If so, then go to more networking events or talk to people in a mall. Do what it takes. Dedicate time and effort to performing these brainstorming functions and start generating some ideas that you can jot down and act on.

5) Schedule

When are you going to blog? And how often?

Scheduling is the action derived from commitment. It helps you meet the commitment you’ve set yourself up for.

I’ll say I only half-failed in this area, if such a thing is possible. I scheduled my weekly series for, well, once a week. However, I didn’t block out a time on my calendar to actually get it done. I just waited for the "right time" to do it. And if I’m like most people, the "right time" never comes. I’m either too busy, not in the right mindset, tired or just not interested. The "right time" can wait for tomorrow, right?

Wrong.

You’ll fail, just like I did. Instead, setup a system for scheduling your blogging activities. For some people, physically putting it into a timeslot on their desk calendar works. For others, having a text message reminder that it’s time to blog can also be effective. Or, if you’re an Outlook kind of person, set it up in your calendar and notifications. If you have the tools to schedule, you need to integrate your blogging with those tools. Make it part of your workflow.

6) Prepare for Rainy Days

There will be times when you just can’t blog. Everyone experiences time crunches, writer’s block or even just plain exhaustion.

You have to plan and prepare for this. I now know this from experience. I got caught up for just a couple of weeks in work and travel. I couldn’t fulfill my weekly series commitment. It began to kill my mindset.

What’s worse is that I could have easily prevented it.

How?

By preparing a rainy day blog reserve. There’s usually time in the week to write a blog post. But if you’ve already written it for the week, then you’re done, right? Not necessarily.

If you’ve met your goal for the week, that’s awesome. Now find the time to grow your rainy day blog reserve. The rainy day blog reserve is simply an emergency archive of unpublished posts that you can activate at any given time. It’s a life preserver for when the waters get choppy.

With this life preserver, you can bail yourself out of tight spots where time or other factors just don’t allow you to meet your commitment. And by saving your commitment, you’re saving your attitude and mindset so that you can continue successful blogging.

7) Build an Audience

Obviously, by blogging you want to build an audience. You want to be heard, talked about and connected with others.

But are you actively taking the steps toward building that audience? Or are you just writing?

When I started my weekly series, I did a couple of things to build an audience. I posted in Facebook and did a couple of Twitter updates. It wasn’t enough, though, and I know with a bigger audience I could have fulfilled my commitment.

When you have an audience expecting something from you, you’ll be surprised about how your commitment shifts from yourself and blogging to your audience. You’re doing it for them. That’s why it’s essential to build a strong audience. A commitment to an audience is a bond that’s hard to break, and you’ll work just as hard to meet that commitment.

So audience-building is a reinforcement activity. It gets you publicity and all that good stuff, but what the reinforcement does to your commitment level is even more important.

Focus on bringing people to your blog. And with that said, I’ll make a new commitment to myself, this blog and my audience. The next post will be about blog success: what I did to bring an audience to the blog.

I hope my failure has resulted in some valuable lessons not only for myself, but for you as well. Some of the points I mentioned are cases of the obvious, but it surprises me to no end how those are the hardest points to follow. Practice these points and follow-through, and you’ll begin to find blog fails hugely outweighed by blog successes. But don’t try to eliminate blog fails. These are essential to learning. Let them come and then let yourself learn from them.

And as a final bonus point: reward yourself. If you’ve committed and successfully met that commitment, give yourself a reward. Whether it’s a fresh cup of coffee or an afternoon on the golf course, do it. Rewarding yourself renews your energy and prepares you for the next blogging activity.

Do you have any points to add to the list above? I’d like to hear them! Post a comment or shoot me an email.