Why Do Blogs Fail?

Taking off from a previous article where I wrote why it is necessary to start a blog, here are some pointers as to how over time blogs tend to dilute the central theme, which after all is writing contents.

Not long back, the idea of blogging caught everyone's fancy. Akin to wildfire-like spread of various types of social media sites - Digg, Orkut, MySpace, YouTube, et al - blogging also became popular in no time. People I know, who are otherwise gainfully occupied elsewhere and have seldom scribbled anything meaningful for a long time, suddenly felt a dire need of expressing themselves through blogs.

That is where lies the attractiveness of blogs. Connecting with others whom probably you may not know. Several tools and applications like MyBlogLog, FeedBurner, FeedBlitz, etc. have made the blogs even more endearing. And terms such as rss, permalink, trackback have become familiar in no time.

What however turned out to be the most effective spade to shove the concept of blogging is the ease of starting one. The other plus is that in most cases it's free to debut and carry on blogging. With Blogger, Wordpress and a host of others, starting a blog is child's play. Blogger's slogan, 'Push-Button Publishing' says it all lucidly.

If you keep in touch with Google Groups' Blogger Help Group, you'd know how the blogging fraternity is rapidly expanding allover. That surely is an indication of people's growing urge to 'publish' their thoughts and actions on the Internet, and in the process be heard and commented upon by others.

However, it's not long when the initial euphoria of blogging slowly starts ebbing, and then starts the pain of maintaining blog. In most cases, this aspect alone is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Since the bottomline of a successful blog is what else but solid contents, many promising startups that lack this virtue end up like an art unfinished.

Why do most blogs perish just after birth? 2 reasons come to mind. One is that for most startup bloogers, blogging is just an infatuation toward being 'seen' on Internet. Doesn't matter a new blog is only a speck of dust in thin air. Since infatuation and seriousness are poles apart from one another, a newbie's blog, if not pursued with vigor, hurtles toward oblivion in no time.

The second reason is more to do with perceived necessity than ability or wherewithal to support new efforts. I'm inclined to include website owners in this category who are already waist-deep in this.

The ease of starting a blog and availability of touchup tools to make it ornamental are juicy enough for many webmasters to start as many blogs as thought necessary. Only later does it dawn that carrying along those many blogs is a big drag on resources.

This brings me to the point I often like to put my bets on. It's that no website or blog can hope to succeed without contents. We've heard so many times that search engines put premium on quality contents and interlinking among them. If this is true for non-blog websites, there's no reason why it shouldn't be for blogs as well.

But, say we put aside search engines' requirements for a moment. What about flesh-n-blood visitors? Would they like a blog if it smells of staleness? When that happens, it signals the end of yet another valiant attempt at blogging. You get the point, don't you?

Partha Bhattacharya owns and runs Words2Content blog that focuses on writing, blogging and optimizing web contents. He also runs Kolkata Musing, a blog on the city of Kolkata in India where he lives.

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