Blogs are a bit like children. You have some sort of idea of how they should turn out, but before long they start to develop their own personalities. I don’t really remember exactly why I started blogging. It was quite a while ago now. But it has become a bit of a mild obsession over the years.
But it hasn’t turned out how I expected. I had envisaged that it would be a lot about news and comment. But when I do that kind of thing it rarely gets much of a reaction. When I do stuff about more background information, like my raw material posts or talking about the science of skin care, this often doesn’t get much reaction either. But a lot of those posts have become very popular over time and gradually build up large numbers of views.
This wasn’t at all how I thought things worked, but there you are.
Anyway, I think it has got to the stage where I seem to have two distinct audiences. There are some people who are interested in what is going on right now. But the larger part of them are just looking for information about something that interests them at the time.
Mulling this over I thought it might work better if I started doing a newsletter about, well news, and kept the blog for more reference stuff. I am not sure exactly how this is going to work. But I have never been sure how any of this was going to work. So I am going to jump in and start doing it and see how it turns out. So one day next week I will be releasing my first newsletter.
I hope this will enable me to address a wider range of issues, put in more comment and opinion pieces and include some of the material I currently drop because it doesn’t really work in a blog format. It will also mean I can scale down on the length of blog posts. I have a feeling that I am being a bit too wordy for some people.
I am now self employed so I have to give some thought to whether this is a good use of my time. I am hoping that it will generate business for my consultancy, and I may take some straight paid for advertising as well. I am hoping I can scale back on the context sensitive ads on this blog if I can make that work. I am not too precious about them, but it does annoy me to see ads running for stuff I have just debunked from time to time.
I won’t be doing anything spammy with it. I won’t pass names on to anyone else or fill your inboxes with promotions for unsavoury products.
If you’d like to join the sign up form is below. I hope you enjoy it.
I love that you compared a blog to a child, it’s so true 🙂 You start off with this fixed idea of what you want it to become eventually, but all you can really do is let it grow and evolve and see what it leads to.