Your Blog Focus: Are You Playing “Ostrich”?

Filed in Blog Better (Blogging 401)

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As we’ll discuss later this week, a focused blog is essential to making money with companies like LinkWorth and getting bids accepted at places like Sponsored Reviews.

So let’s say you followed my tips on how to focus your blog to improve traffic and profit and you still don’t know what your blog’s focus is. What then?

Well, it could be that you’re “playing ostrich”.

You’ve heard the myth about the ostrich, no doubt: when it senses trouble it buries its head and believes that whatever it refuses to see must not really be there.

Telling yourself that your blog doesn’t have a focus is, many times, a blogger’s way of playing “ostrich”. Why? Because it’s a heck of a lot easier to bury your head than to acknowledge that perhaps your blog has become too filled with disconnected, disparate reviews.

“Wait a minute,” you’re probably saying, “I know my blog hasn’t become like that!”

No?

Then let’s try something: Look over the last 30 entries you’ve written. If more than 10 were paid reviews then you do have a focus: you’re more interested in writing paid reviews — any paid reviews — than delivering quality, informative content to your readership. Worse yet, your blog is on its way to becoming a splog.

Is that what you intended?

No?

Then it’s time to pull your head out of the sand.

Look at it this way: if you didn’t have any visitors to your site you’d find it hard to get paying opps. What would you write about then? Are there topics that interest you but which you haven’t had time to blog about because you’ve been busy chasing low-paying opps?

Here is my challenge to you: spend a few days blogging as if no one was reading your site, as if you didn’t qualify for $5 here and there, as if you were just starting your blog from the very beginning.

Explore your interests. Do some research. Write more in-depth entries. Bare your soul, if you’re up to it. But blog about the things you feel passionately about even if it’s nothing like what you think your readers expect. You just might discover you’ve got a wealth of information inside of you that’s just waiting to come out. Let it.

Know what will happen then? Your blog will start to take on a more identifiable focus. As you grow more confident in being yourself on your blog your current readers will appreciate the new passion that comes through in your writing. You’ll also start attracting like-minded readers, including fellow bloggers interested in linking your site.

Eventually you’ll find, too, that advertisers will start to seek you out because YOU finally figured out what your blog’s about and, as a result, they could, too.

And all you had to do was pull your head out to make it happen.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Blog Better (Blogging 401). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Tagged in: blog focus | blogging