Guest Post by Roger Rae
Internet has evolved a lot and with that blogging and blogosphere has completely changed from what it was initially. The early blogging rules of web 1.0 era that every blogger used to follow are not effective these days. We’ve compiled a list of old blogging rules for you which are not as effective as they used to be, so that you can stop wasting your time on them.
You Should Post Everyday – This was (and still it is) the most important rule of blogging. In fact, you can find this rule on every “Top X things to be a Successful Blogger“ list and e-book. Updating your blog daily shows that how serious you are about your blog. More posts mean more content, more love from search engines and eventually more readers. But unfortunately this rule is not effective in current scenario. When millions of pages of content are being added to blogosphere every day, you can’t expect to increase your readership just by increasing the frequency of posting.
The new rule of blogging is to update your blog only when you have something worthy enough to share. Posting anything just for the sake of updating your blog is not better than posting nothing at all. Doing one quality post in a week is much better for you and your readers than updating your blog multiple times a day with low quality posts.
Every post should be at least 500 words – This is the most famous rule of early blogging which is still being followed by most of the bloggers. The followers of this rule focus more on the word count than content. But the new rule is – size doesn’t matter at all, it is the content that matters. The low quality content can’t grab the reader’s attention just because of the word count. Similarly, if the content is of reader’s interest, your readers will still love it even if it is very long.
High traffic means more success – In early days, the only goal of bloggers was to increase their traffic and page views. They used to do everything they could to increase their page views. Although, traffic is still the most important factor in present blogging but the meaning of traffic is completely changed. The success in blogosphere these days doesn’t depend only on traffic. Success now depends on the quality of traffic. To be successful, blogger has to work to build the quality readership for his blog which is interested and passionate about the blog niche.
Good content don’t need marketing – In the early blogging days, bloggers have to focus only on one thing “to generate quality content”. They knew that creating good content will automatically get readers. But as the blogosphere has evolved, this rule is not at all effective. Nowadays, blogger can’t sit back just after creating content and wait for traffic. They have to go out and promote their content amongst their target audience. No matter how great your content is if you are not going to promote it nobody is going to read it.
Roger Rae works for Fortepromo, a promotional products company based in Minnesota.
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