How To Create An “Unsuccessful” Blog

To have a successful blog you’re meant to choose a blog niche, a single topic or area of closely related topics and develop a readership around that topic. This blog does not do that. This blog contains posts about a whole range of topics that interest and energize me. I don’t expect to develop a loyal readership and I don’t care, because that is not my aim. My aim is to write. To develop and improve my writing while exploring my interests. To educate, inform, challenge and entertain with my words, and that’s it.

This aim is heretical in blogging circles. To most bloggers, there is no point in having a blog if you don’t have a loyal and regular readership subscribed to your RSS feed. Most visitors to this blog will be from search engine traffic. I’m all for random one off traffic. If one person learns something from a post on PMDD and another person downloads a free mp3 and neither subscribe to the feed, that’s fine. They’ve both benefited from the blog and found it useful – surely that is a success in of itself.

I do not need to follow blog rules about finding a niche to have an interesting and useful blog. It just won’t be “successful” in terms of the accepted norm. Why not diversity the meaning of “success” in the blogosphere? If someone is searching the internet for information on how to treat PCOS related acne, and they find the solution on my blog – that’s success. If someone is looking for information on a band they can’t find anywhere else but find it here – that’s success. For this blog, success is not about having 10,000 subscribers. If I achieve my goal by writing about the things I want to, and a googler achieves his/her goal by finding information on the specific thing he or she is after, we’ve both had a successful outcome.

You might ask, if I blog about PCOS and music, why not have a separate PCOS blog and music blog? The reason is I’d have to create 5 to10 blogs to cover all the things I write about, and some topics just don’t generate enough material to warrant a dedicated blog. I do have other blogs and they follow the successful blogging formula to some degree, but not this one and that’s fine.

If you are going to write about unrelated topics on the one blog, however, there are a few important things you can do to help your visitors and readers. One is to create categories for each topic you write about and use them effectively. When the punk nerd comes to my blog to download a rare live track, he does not want to find a post about my monthly menstrual blood harvest. Another useful thing you can do is create an RSS feed for each category. Having a single feed is fine, but it’s unlikely that some one who is interested in music posts will also want to read about Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. So it would be wise to create a feed for the categories you blog about regularly. I haven’t done this myself, but, it’s a good idea.

If you just want to write for pleasure and not glory, for your own development as a writer and not subscriber numbers, the most effective way to create an “unsuccessful blog” is to not choose a niche and enjoy your writing and blogging freedom.

Do you have an “Unsuccessful” blog?