I’ve been blogging for 4 years now. During that time, I’ve had “several” blogs, on a few different domain names, covering a variety of subjects. Most of the posts I’ve ever written, are now right here on this blog … after moving them over, and redirecting the domain names. I’ve got marketing stuff, I’ve got travel stuff, I’ve got Hawaii posts, Military posts, personal growth advice, and plenty of pictures, etc., etc,.
What I don’t have is one main topic, or theme.
I post what I feel like posting. And lately, that seems to be mainly pictures of my kids.
Here’s the thing though …
Looking back through my traffic stats, nobody actually looks at the majority of my personal, “picture” posts. Well, I can’t really say “nobody” .. the traffic that does come to look at posts containing pictures of my little girls, overwhelmingly consists of my Facebook friends.
Which leads me to the thought:
Why not just put these type of posts/pictures straight to Facebook in the first place?
Because …
You know what type of posts do continue to get traffic, even months or years after they were written? Articles that provide information. Imagine that?
A couple of the most popular posts on this blog, day-in and day-out are also some of the longer articles, that I actually took a bit of time to work on:
Military PT Workout – I wrote this post so that I could actually remember all of the exercises that we did at Wheeler AAF as part of our Thursday “Knipe PT” sessions. Apparently quite a few other people have found it useful too.
Welcome to COB Adder, Iraq – Last time I was in Iraq, I had to put together a welcome letter for some of our new people that would be arriving in a couple of months. Since I was doing the work anyway, I decided to also write an article for the blog. I still get emails about, and comments on that post .. and I haven’t even been there in well over a year.
How to take Fireworks Pictures – This one gets popular about twice a year … and one of those times is coming up again soon. When I wrote this, my goal was genuinely to give people ideas that might help them to take better fireworks pictures. Apparently that sort of thing is appreciated.
So what lesson do I take away from this?
Although I’m quite sure that my friends and family really do enjoy seeing pictures of my kids, it’s quite apparent that what readers of this blog Really Want is information that helps them do or know something.
I suspect that people will be happier to subscribe to this blog if they can expect to get a couple of these type of informative articles every week.
While those that want to see my pictures, or hear about what my kids are up to, can just find me on Facebook … because that’s where this stuff really belongs.
What do you think … how “personal” should a blog be?
