Sometime last December when I was in Hong Kong, I decided to get serious about my blog. Prior to that I had done nothing in terms of promotion or marketing. Part of the process of taking my blog seriously was going out to learn all I could about blogging. Even thought I have been keeping this website as a personal website since 1998, I never considered it a blog. At first I just did all the HTML by hand, and only later did I install MovableType and WordPress.
Part of the education involved reading sites which dealt with the subject of blogging. I currently subscribe to over a dozen such sites, and there are tons more out there. Many of which can be lumped into the Make Money Online category.
For the most part, I’ve found these these sites to be completely devoid of actual information to help bloggers. They mostly tend to be fluff pieces or they just state what should be common sense. The article which pushed me over the edge is one from Problogger. The article is titles “Why Being a Better Writer Affects the Performance of your Blog”. No shit.
You can read the article yourself, but the rest of the article is just repeating the title over and over. Being a good writer is better than being a bad writer. If that wasn’t something you couldn’t figure out yourself, there is no hope for you anyhow.
Another winner type of category is the numbered list: “X ways to do Y”, “Z reasons to do W”. You have probably seen them. They to are usually just lists of common sense things.
What is seriously lacking is data. Hard data where someone tests something and then tries to determine what sort of results it got. Even if data is bad, it would at least be an attempt to try and get some truth rather than just spout broad platitudes.
The blogs about blogging genre has sunk to the level of the self help section of the bookstore for the world of technology.
2 replies on “The Vacuous World of Blogs About Blogging”
Hi, you could perform the experiment and provide other readers -like me – of the results. But there are still blogs out there which really give you the nitty-gritty of blogging. Don’t give up.
Thanks for sharing and happy blogging.
The entire “Make Money Online” area makes me ill. It’s not about how to make money, it about making money for the blog owner.
The title of the article you mentioned, repeated over and over, is done to gain keyword dominance in Google. When people visit a site, it is the owner’s hope they will sign up for one of the many get-rich-quick schemes they have advertisements for.
The hundreds of Philippines-based Make Money blogs are the worst. Hundred of Google Ads and affiliate programs. Okay, now I’m ranting.
Do what you love, do it well, and the money will follow. I have some integrity. That can’t be said for few people in the Make Money Online niche.