The Queen of Continuity has slipped up. That’s me. No matter where or when you hear me talk about blogging, I have
one mantra – continuity. Great blogs (even not-so-great ones) require commitment through continuity. Readers are insatiable and require a blog post as if it were the daily horoscope. And now, my confession – recently I haven’t practiced what I preach.
I’ve never had the fortitude to post daily. From the onset, I managed expectations and let readers know they wouldn’thear from me daily. But, I did promise weekly posts. I feel it’s the minimum requirement for a blog and, for my topics and readers, it’s an acceptable frequency. I’m not, after all, covering the political scene. But recently I didn’t meet even that commitment. Part of the problem is that I manage three blogs plus an increasing amount of social media posts for clients. Yeah. Yeah. Excuses don’t cut it. Readers don’t care.
A blog that isn’t consistent isn’t really a blog, just as diary with only two entries is not really a diary– only an attempt at one. And, a newspaper that isn’t delivered weekly or daily—depending on its frequency promise—isn’t really a newspaper.
I got a call from a reader when I missed last week’s personal post at The Parent Rap. The fact that a reader missed the post helped spur me back into action this week. The truth is that with three concurrent blogs, I was considering dropping my original blog, even though it is the closest one to my heart and the one responsible for turning me into a “blogger”.
I also took a break from the The Blogger’s Bulletin when Chris Franklin, our shephard/conscience/editor, gave contributors permission to enjoy the holidays and slack off a bit. It was permission I should not have taken. Just as a marathon runner doesn’t stop training and running during the holidays, neither should a blogger. If there’s a break in the rhythm, it can be fatal. In this way, blogs are no different than newspapers. In the print world, a press break means the web paper on the press tore or broke. It literally stops the presses and wreaks havoc on the press schedule. The result is always late papers on driveways, angry customer calls to the customer service line, and lost readers.
Most bloggers don’t have thousands of readers. And in today’s world, even newspapers don’t have the luxury of being able to lose one more reader. The moral remains the same – consistency counts. There is no room for excuses. If snail mail can promise delivery in rain, or snow or sunshine – so can a blogger, who generally is able to deliver content while remaining warm and snug inside away from treacherous elements.
That’s a good point you’re making, Rhona. Sorry if I was a bad influence on you. I’ll look at expressly defining on the BB front-page what readers should expect from BB in terms of post frequency; right now we don’t have anything describing that.