Learn from your past to succeed in the future

Yesterday was the 3rd Anniversary (or, Blogoversary) of the day that I started my blog at anotherguy.us. It has been a very long road, with many ups and downs, winding paths and dark tunnels to travel through. I have written close to 500 articles on this website over the past three years, have met several dozen amazing people with great ideas on what life has to offer, and have been opened up to a world with no limits.

It seems that someone has always been around to tell me to constantly be learning from my past. That it’s the only way to do great things (and not fail) in your future. There’s plenty of examples that I could share to prove that this is truth, but on this memorable day in my own life, I thought it would be appropriate to share what I’ve learned from blogging on AnotherGuy.us for 3 solid years.

Here are some of the lessons that I’ve learned by looking at my past. Hopefully, you will learn something from them as well.

1. Consistency in Content Creation

I didn’t name this section ‘Consistency in Content Creation’ because it sounded funny when you say it fast. Those are also the best words that I can use to describe one of the most important aspects of blogging that I have learned (and am still learning).

Being consistent in any of your duties, blogging just being one of them, is very important to being successful in your endeavors. You can see first hand how powerful this idea is when you look at my blog statistics from the last three years. In times that I wrote regularly, I had many more visitors than in the times when I had writing spurts (7 articles one day and then none for a month).

By updating your blog as often and regularly as possible, you are showing your visitors that they can trust you, and you are keeping yourself relevant to the information highway surfers. It’s also a great practice for discipline to force yourself to write regularly, even when you don’t want to. To many people call themselves “writer’s” but can’t write consistently on their blogs or other projects.

This should change.

2. Design is important, but don’t let it kill you

One of my biggest problems has been in letting my blog design alone for long enough that people can start to enjoy it again. It seems that once every few months (sometimes shorter) I go through a phase where I need to re-do the entire design of my blog… again. I have honestly lost count of how many times I’ve put my site into maintenance mode so that I could rebuild it (structurally and with aesthetically) from the ground up.

Tip: Your visitors hate that.

If you get into the habit of redesigning your website every few months because you’ve grown tired of it, then you had better start checking yourself. My statistics have shown, every time in the past that I’ve done a re-build, that I lose a ton of visitors who were finally getting familiar with how my content was being presented.

Besides that, though, you lose a lot of the SEO ‘juice’ that you’d been building up with the previous articles and links, you waste many hours in the development process (rather than in writing) and you actually burn yourself out on working on your website, because you’ve already spent several days on the code that holds it all together.

At some point, you just need to pick a template and a CMS and get to writing. If you’re not writing, you aren’t being consistent, and now you’ve broken two rules.

3. Visitor numbers don’t amount to everything

About 4 months ago I finally gave up my statistics tracking software, HaveAMint, and decided to just use plain old Google Analytics to keep track of everything. I hardly look at my stats anymore, and then only to get an idea on what articles are more effective in getting the attention that I want from specific groups of people.

Other bloggers are stuck in this same spot, and won’t stop checking their analytics every few minutes to see if anyone else looked at their latest comment. Besides the fact that you’ve stopped writing to check your stats (and so have thrown off your groove), you also become increasingly un-productive, you start to get obsessed with numbers that may or may not be showing up on a specific day, and you’ll start killing people in cold-blood because you need some crazy-awesome story to get more attention from other crazy people to get more visitors each month.

If you don’t manage to get yourself thrown in jail, you will manage to get yourself thrown out of people trust circle. You can have all of the visitors that you want, but if you aren’t influencing them to do anything but glance at the site and then leave, then you haven’t accomplished anything.

4. Pick a topic you love, not one that you think other people love

Unless, of course, you love the same thing that other people do. Then it’s a win-win situation. If you are unsure, though, just keep writing. There are billions of people in this world and the web is growing any day. There are people out there who are dying to read a blog just like yours, but they’ll only come if you are consistently writing on that blog.

The first version of this blog was all about Windows Vista and how awesome it was (oh… what childish ways I had). Then I transformed into a blog about my faith (which was a dud from the start). Soon I was blogging constantly about Joomla, then WordPress, then advertising, social media, computers…. and most recently about Palm webOS and the community of gadget lovers most like myself.

This last version is one that I actually really enjoy writing about, and I do so on a semi-regular basis over at webOSroundup.com

5. Always evolve (learn, grow).

As much as you MUST remain consistent and trustworthy by posting about topics that you enjoy and that others will be interested in reading, you also have to be able to change with the times as new software comes out, breaking news is made and history books are re-written. You never want to be stuck like I was, talking about how amazing Windows Vista was and not doing my research to find out that Mac OSX was, indeed, a much better OS than I had originally believed.

If you aren’t learning something new about your topics of interest, then you won’t ever attract the new visitors that you believe you deserve. If you don’t have something relevant to the times on your website, then people’s eyes will quickly glaze over and they’ll click over to some other page that you don’t want them to see (like your competitors blog).

Bounce rates, my friend, are a scary thing to behold.

6. Writing is about communication, so be sure to say thank you.

Whenever I stick to those five things above, and I write about the best topics, join a great online community and watch the stars align perfectly in the sky, I always tend to see a huge increase in subscribers, unique visitors, and my all-time favorite, commenters. The more you are open, honest, and communicative to the people in your community, the more that people will want to be a part of what you are creating… even if it is just a blog.

That means getting on Twitter, creating a Facebook profile (and possibly a fan page), joining Digg and subscribing to other websites that have interesting articles about your favorite topics (and then commenting on them). Hopefully, you’ll see those numbers increase, too.

Anything else?

There is a lot more, but anything else that I have to say can wait until a future article. If you want to find out more about the things that I’ve learned in the last three years as a blogger, send me an email, follow me on twitter, or subscribe to this blog (and don’t be afraid to ask questions!).

How long have you been blogging? What have you learned?