More Blog Content Griping - Keeping your readers happy

I'm going to stray a little from the usual online advertising content on this post because I think that this is an important issue.

About a month ago, I wrote about a fundamental flaw with informational blogs and how they're like a long streaming feed and when you discover a new blog and read the few posts on the homepage, you're only getting a momentary snapshot of the writer's thoughts, and not the entire thing.

Well, here is another thing that I've noticed, that should be brought to attention. There are certain prominent  (and non-prominent) writers/marketing professionals (I won't name any names) in the blogging community who expound on the importance of customer service, and how certain gestures can keep their customers happy and coming back, yet it seems that they don't necessarily always put those philosophies to practice when they're addressing their readers. Here are two ways that I think bloggers can keep their customers (their readers) happy:

1. This first one is especially true if your core group of readers are time-strapped professionals who read your blog for inspiration and information to advance their careers - don't post unless you have something of value to say. Bloggers have it in their heads that they need to post 3-5 times a week to increase or maintain traffic. Sure, the more you post, the more people will find your blog through search engines, and the more vibrant your blog will seem. However, to the people that read your blog on a regular basis, it ends up being a waste of time to go to the blog to see new content, and have it be something irrelevant.
2. It seems to be common practice when you want to elaborate or continue the discussion of a topic previously posted. However, in my opinion, this doesn't lead to the best user experience. Why not have all the information about a particular topic lumped together rather than it being spread out across 8 different posts. Bloggers can always append new information onto an old post; I do it all the time. What this does is it strengthens the relative quality and detail of posts on your blog rather than diluting them. The issue with this is in alerting readers that there is additional information appended to an old post. I'm sure there are ways of getting around this, but what I'm going to do moving forward is to create a new post that will serve as an alert and point readers to posts that I have updated. Then, after a week or two, I will just take that alert post down. Simple enough.

Now, I'm going to send a trackback to the post The Flaw with Informational Blogs so that people that see that post (possibly through a search engine) will be able to get to this, relevant post.