Category Archives: Social Media

5 signs its time to quit blogging

I have juggled with blogging for almost a decade now trying to maintain and post to a real estate related blog and this personal weblog of thoughts, observations, events, tech stuff, pictures, and miscellaneous topics that intrigued me for a moment. I guess at some point in every blogger’s life, the blogging becomes much more of a chore than a pleasure – the hassles outweigh the rewards. As I make the move toward decommissioning my real estate blog I am thinking of signs that its time to quit. One of the first rules of blogging is to post lists and get more readers: 10 best…, 12 most effective, 7 reasons…, etc. Here’s my list of 5 signs it’s time to quit blogging.

1. Lack of readers – you are agonizing over your posts and the stats are showing you are only getting a handful of visitors a month and to top that off, your bounce rate is in the high 70s. Blogging has just become personal journalling; you might as well be doing it in a Moleskin as wasting the resources putting it online. And, oh, don’t let anyone give that line about the long tail.

2. Lack of passion – If you are doing a topical blog like real estate, you must have passion to crank out interesting content. Otherwise you find yourself posting monthly housing stats, and links to interesting real estate stories rather than seeking out the unusual and the interesting.

3. Lack of financial reward – whether you are blogging to build or promote your business or blogging professionally – monetizing your site through ads or affiliations, if you are not seeing suitable rewards, either monetarily or through increased business, name recognition or credibility, it is probably time to move along to another medium that has a better possibility of helping pay the bills.

4. Lack of talent – I know it may be hard to admit, but maybe you just don’t have what it takes to be a blogger. Maybe constructing a sentence is a challenge. Maybe you just can’t get all that stuff about keywords and metatags right. Maybe you don’t have the thought patterns of a writer. Maybe you suck as a blogger. Don’t hang on and torture yourself, find something else. In my case, I realize that I am a better curator than blogger. Maybe your calling is sharing stuff rather than creating it. You may get loads of interaction on Google Plus or Facebook and enjoy that type of interaction rather than waiting around for someone to comment on your blog posts.

5. Attitude – You have followed all the “rules” the blogging gurus have taught you, and still aren’t quite where you want to be. What’s your attitude? Are you whipped? Tired? Burned out? Why not join me and try Defiant for a while.

In future posts I want to discuss ways we can share our thoughts and ideas most effectively. The next post will be about breaking the “rules” of blogging. I will also share the progress of dismantling my real estate blog.

Do we really need to spend much time with search engines other than Google?

78% of my referred page views come from Google

I was looking at the referral stats for one of my blogs, and was actually a little shocked at the search engine numbers. Google search sends me almost 25 times the views that Bing does – over 78% of search engine traffic. And that’s not counting Google Image Search which produced 4 times the results that Bing did. Yahoo and AOL results are almost negligible. I seem to index as well in Bing as I do in Google for my keywords and phrases, but the results just aren’t there. I am just wondering if my results are common, and if so, do I need to even think about spending time on SEO and SEM for Bing, Yahoo, and AOL.

Google+ and Pinterest out-refer Facebook and Twitter

Looking at referrers outside of search engines, once again Google plays a big part. Google+ is a top referring source, followed by Pinterest, then Facebook. I expect G+ referrals to rise as more and more folks learn to appreciate the platform and find it to be a refuge from the constant exploitive changes at Facebook. I don’t pay much attention to Pinterest, but for the amount of time I spend with it, it seems to be quite a powerful referrer- maybe it’s because I pin mostly my own self-hosted images.

I would love to hear about how the search engines are performing for you in driving traffic. Is this just a quirk, or are you seeing the same type of numbers?

Related articles

“To Bing, Or Not To Bing?” Will Microsoft’s Search Engine Ever Become A Verb? (lifehacker.com.au)
Bing’s brand problem: People prefer Google regardless of search results (bgr.com)

Facebook Unfriend Finder and Unfriending – Revisited

16 Replies

[UPDATE ON THE UNFRIEND FINDER FACEBOOK APP – May 17, 2013
This was posted by the developer of the app today:
The social network asked the removal of the extension because it violates its terms.
Specifically, Unfriend Finder injects unauthorized code into the social networks’s source code in order to alter the way that the webpages are rendered in users browsers
It adds unauthorized links to users’ bookmark sections;
And posts unauthorized notifications regarding which users have “unfriended” the user or “ignored” his or her friend requests.

I cannot enforce this and will cease the developement of this Extension.
Unfriend Finder has been around for 3 years, and many of you enjoyed this, but it cannot go further.

Thank you for your support.]

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Last week, on Facebook, I asked this question: Would you unfriend a Facebook “friend” who won’t speak to you or even acknowledge your presence in public?” The comments reflected a wide range of feelings about the nature of Facebook friendship: Friend vs. acquaintance, mood at the time of encounter, context, setting, intentions – responses indicating that Facebook relationships, even with people you have never met IRL (in real life) can be complex and emotional. Perhaps the best thought out comment was from my IRL friend, Roy Barnes:

“Here’s a flowchart that I may or may not use: are they a friend or an acquaintance? If friend, try to say something to them IRL. If an acquaintance, was it a shun (not returning friendly gestures) or just narcissistic obliviousness? If former, unfriend. If latter, flip a coin.”

Last year I posted about the then new and somewhat controversial Unfriend Finder Facebook App, asking if it was somehow helpful to know who had unfriended you, or if it could be stressful or even dangerous to have that knowledge. If you want to give the app a try, you can find and install it HERE. The app displays like this: Continue reading →