Sometimes, It Just Goes Wrong: When to Ditch!

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Sometimes, It Just Goes Wrong: When to Ditch!

stats woes The writing life is a process of trial and error. Getting it right or wrong with social media; finding the right blog audience; marketing your book to the correct readers… You can research, try and in the end, sometimes you just have to bail out and admit defeat in an area. Note that I am saying “an area.” Don’t quit completely over any mistake.

I had a ‘great’ blog post idea late last year. I decided to start every week with a quick dose of motivation for writers: “Writer’s Rocket Fuel.” I set the posts up; watched my stats… hoped for an improvement; watched my stats some more… had a little sigh… felt like an idiot… You know, you’ve been there too. My fuel pump sprang a leak. This blog started as a blog on creativity… that sprung an instant, fatal leak too… I’ve had to swallow my pet project ideas, and be willing to learn without discouragement turning poisonous.

So what to do? Firstly, I had to look at why Writing Rocket Fuel died. I had gone against my own advice and set up a feature that would be a statistic booster. How many times have I said “this is not about SEO, numbers etc.?” I was sucked in like everyone else. That was my biggest failure. Sure, Rocket Fuel would encourage people, but it would make my follower and visit stats a little fatter. I think the universe slapped me with my own preaching. Fair enough.

rocket fuel I also set it up so I wouldn’t have to promote these quick shots as heavily as my regular blog posts. My Triberr buddies faithfully passed the posts on… but they weren’t being read. This could be partially due to the quote posts being readable in the promo, so no one had to click a link… another lesson. Short posts serve no purpose in attracting readers.

So yesterday, I decided to ditch. I deleted around twenty useless posts which I knew wouldn’t fly. I renamed the others, and decided to promote the most valuable content properly. Several remaining posts with the best content will appear over the year, but spread out. While I was at it, I gave the blog a massive overhaul and deleted posts I hated, were out of date or were just not up to the standard I wanted.

The take-home message: don’t be afraid to start over. You may feel as annoyed as Penny in the video below, but it does get the job completed. Fresh starts are good. Be brave.

This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.