Jeremy Wagstaff with Dow Jones has been blogging for five years, and yesterday had a good post about what he's learned. It's a great post. In particular, his first two points really hit home with me:
- It’s no longer about feeding the beast. I’ve tried to post once a day, but I think the abundance of blogs nowadays makes a nonsense of that. People nowadays have so much to read they don’t want space filled up for the sake of it. (That’s what a newspaper is for.) Don’t be afraid to not post. No one unsubscribes from a feed because it’s silent for a few days; they unsubscribe because it’s too noisy.
- Comments are great, but so is silence. Loose Wire has never been about lots of comments (or, come to think of it, lots of readers) and sometimes I wonder whether I’d prefer lots of comments. Some blogs, the discussions in comments are better than the original post. But that’s not the only way to go. Some people aren’t just the commenting type, and that’s cool. The only readers aren’t the ones that comment; commenters aren’t the only people to write for.
Jeremy has captured something I've been struggling with too -- what is the right level of posting? Given most of us have a day job, how to gauge the right number of posts in a week? Great answer: when I have something to say. That's an easy rule to follow!