How do you stand out in the blogosphere?
Do you want to?
It’s important to ask that second question first because it’s tough work. Blogging.
Because the work never gets done. And just when you think you’re done, say, when you realize you’ve reached a certain number of regular readers or a certain number of strays who click on your page for some mysterious reason, you realize how sensitive those readers are to quality.
Those with short attention spans want good introductory hooks or great visuals. The deep ones want, well, depth. The busy ones want good timing. The “fans” want something every few days and the strays will come only if there’s excellence every time. Some will even start at the bottom of the post and read upwards. So the ending has to have a kick to it.
It does not matter who they are or how they like to glance through your page but they know when you’ve become complacent and are slacking off.
It’s not always easy to keep going under that kind of routine pressure.
So evaluate whether maintaining the blog is really worth it for you before trying to stand out.
The benefits you gain from blogging don’t have to be necessarily concrete, about money or creating a social platform. It can be about self-discipline, writing practice or a personal challenge.
But once you’ve decided to stay, it’s worth it to do a job well.
So how do you stand out?
By creating and maintaining an excellent blog, of course.
Except that in the world of blogging though, excellence seems to be a whole lot about tenacity, about hanging in there for days and weeks producing writing from a seemingly endless source of inspiration.
It’s about posting something at regular intervals knowing that it’s not humanly possible to maintain quality in each and every post but trying to anyway. It’s about realizing that no blogger is indispensable and that readers’ memories are really short and so it’s important to show up once in a while.
There’s no place like the blogosphere to realize the importance of the adage out of sight, out of mind.
Blogging is also about knowing that an excellent post will emerge only once in a while if you keep at it and those are worth those other days of frustration. But those posts will also have a very short shelf life, just like the other fluff of your own that will bury it soon.
So ultimately it’s about keeping those larger plans in mind.
Why am I blogging? Where do I want to go with this?
bottledworder 
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