These months have been fun. Interesting. Insightful. Intriguing. Stressful. Addictive. Addictive!? Yes, blogging is addictive. But not at the beginning, later. Later you say? Yes, later. Bloggers go through 5 different stages. 5? Yeah, that’s the number of stages I have observed so far. You mean like the 7 stages of grief? Kind of. Really? Yeah. How do you know? I went through them. But if only you went through them… well, and ZoltarStark. Two peas in a pot. True, but the olivetalks team’s experiences served to create the theory and now we are testing it. I know personally two other bloggers who have started blogging recently and I can see at what stage they are at the moment. Really? Yeah. So these two bloggers will serve to test the olivetalks-blogging-theory? Well, the two bloggers serve as our first two “guinea pigs” to check our theory. To test your olivetalks-blogging-theory? Now you named our theory, not us. Well, it’s a cool name. Ok. So what are the names of the stages? They are… And does every blogger stay in each stage the same amount of time? Well,… And can a blogger go backwards? What? I mean, if a blogger passes a stage, can they go back to a previous stage later on? eeeh… And do you think there will be more stages? Hey! let me tell you the 5 stages first! Then ask! ok…

olivetalks-5-stages-blogging-theory (oh, crap, the name stuck) He, he, he… Shut up! ok…

1. Blog fright
2. Blog doubt
3. Blog fever
4. Blog exhaustion (plus blog stats plunge panic attack)
5. Blog peace

1. Blog fright

It takes the blogger a few weeks or even months to come up with that super cool name the blog will have. The blogger finally buys the domain, obtains a hosting service and sets up the Wordpress or b2evolution or Blogger or… blog. And then… nothing. All the cool ideas he/she had for the blog disappear. All they can think of writing is “Hi, my name is yyy, and this is my blog. Hope you read me”.

For the blogger to gain confidence and improve from this post (or even several posts) to less timid posts can take days if not weeks. It is a daunting moment. The blogger suddenly realizes what they write might be read and their opinions criticized, ridiculed or… ignored.

2. Blog doubt

The blogger starts writing posts with a bit more confidence. He/She sees it is not so hard and hey, what he/she wrote the previous night is actually interesting… And then the blogger checks the stats and realizes that nobody but their mother has read the posts. Hmmm… is it because the posts I have written are not that interesting? Will anybody ever read my blog? What’s the point? Am I not thinking too much of myself for believing I could blog and people might want to know what I have to say? Should I not just stop? What if blogging is not for me?? - The blogger cries with amounting panic.

3. Blog fever

Suddenly, after a few (a couple, a dozen, a hundred…) posts, a Googler reaches one of the blogger’s posts. A Googler means someone, not family, looked for something using a search engine like Google or Yahoo, and found the link to a post of the blogger and actually pressed it and visited the blog. The blog has been found! It has been read! If the blog has something like Clustrmaps or any other kind of map that shows where the visitor’s to the blog come from, the map might even have an extra dot (besides the ones marking the author’s location and his/her mother’s).

The blog has been read (doesn’t matter if it was only by a couple of random visitors from even more random cities), the blog’s raison d’être, has been discovered. And here starts a period where the blogger needs to publish every day. The blogger cannot see but posts in every task/story/anecdote/experience of the day. All day’s activities become posts with titles, tags, categories… The blogger cannot go to sleep even if it is 5 am in the morning and he/she must get up to go to work in an hour, if the day’s post has not been published.

And if a comment is by any chance left by someone (again, not a blood-relative), the “hyper-ness” will prevent the blogger from sleeping that night completely.

4. Blog exhaustion (plus blog stats plunge panic attack)

Suddenly, because of a work deadline, a trip, an absolute physical/mental breakdown or a blogging aversion reaction, the blogger will stop writing posts. The blogger will try to think of things to write about and will come up empty handed (empty headed?). He/she will feel their brain is depleted. All there was to say, has been said. Feck the blog and its overpowering control of my life! – the blogger will scream to the silent computer.

And days/weeks/months without posts will pass by. And the world will still go round even though the blogger has not published anything in two days, a week, two weeks, a month… But out of curiosity, the blogger will check the stats from time to time. The stats will show that the number of visits continue to increase. How can that be??? Maybe the quality of the posts wasn’t so bad, and Googlers keep finding the posts. So without posting new things, people still come? Wow! Forever? Will they?…

OH! NO! The stats went down!

One day the number of visits will drop, maybe only slightly or not really overall, just at a particular time or day, but the blogger will suffer the blog stats plunge panic attack and the fear of losing those readers will prompt the blogger to go back to writing…

5. Blog peace

After the blog stats plunge panic attack the blogger will realise two things: blogging must be done regularly to keep the visitors coming but it must be done without losing oneself in the process. A new post doesn’t have to be published every day. Blogging must be done as long as it is entertaining not as a compulsory task. If it is raining, it can be quite nice to sit in front of the laptop and write a new story for your blog, but if it is sunny, dude (or dudette) go out!

The end of the 5 stages of bloggers.. until a 6 one is found…

What do you think? Are they true? Did you go through those stages? Do you find yourself in one of those stages? Did you “lose” someone to blogging? How long…

Woman, now you are the one asking loads of questions…

Oops, true.

Related post(s)

• Blogging strategies: length, frequency and topics (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)

When starting a new blog, three doubts arise:

1. Should the posts be long or short
2. Should new posts appear every day (even more than once?) or every few days?
3. What should the posts be about?

1. Length of the posts

ZoltarStark already went through the differences between post lengths in his post One Size Does Not Suit All post. He compared short and to the point posts with more detailed articles, concluding that both had their audience. People that have little time will not read posts that look long, while those looking for detailed information on a subject will pass your blog if they see you only say a sentence on their topic of interest.

2. Frequency of posts

Two extremes: when several new posts appear each day (with the risk of regular readers getting overwhelmed); when no new posts appear in over a week, or even worse, a month (in this case the risk is readers might think the blog is “dead” and not come back). Then there is the in-between position: 2-3 of posts per week on average.

3. The blog’s topics/subjects

There are three main types of blogs: a. where different subjects are discussed, b. where all the posts have something in common, c. personal blogs.

1. multi-subject blogs: where one day the post will be about the dangers of fireworks and the next day about how to make your guinea pig understand Linux.
2. blogs with a main aim/topic behind them: they may talk about different aspects or subjects, but they will have an idea in common (for example Computer blogs or Theatre-reviews blogs like Hairline).
3. personal blogs: where the author shares his/her experiences in life, stories, anecdotes, etc.

While blog types b and c will be able to create a group of followers or regular readers, type a will have it a bit harder. If the posts have little in common besides the author(s), it will be difficult to keep a “faithful” group of readers. For example, in olivetalks readers of the Xen posts will probably not be interested in the Rio Hair Laser Remover ones, and viceversa. But it will be easier to have new visitors arriving in blog types a and b from search engines like Google, because it is more likely they will discuss topics that are currently searched for by Internet users.

So… all in all, balance is the answer? What about real examples?

What I have done is compare the Wordpress stats of two quite different blogs which have been running along a similar period of time: olivetalks and elblogboyacense.

• olivetalks is a “long(ish) posts + medium post frequency + type a” kind of blog. It has posts on quite a variety of topics (I mean, look at the categories, and you’ll agree). The posts are not short, but so far we haven’t published any that went on and on. And we have published an average of 1 post every second day.
• elblogboyacense on the other hand is a “short posts + very frequent + type b” kind of blog. They publish several posts per day which are usually only a few lines long (10 tops) and all the posts have a common denominator: they might be interesting to the people in the Department of Boyacá in Colombia. They have published about 3 posts per day.

Oh, and while olivetalks is mostly in English (with the odd post in Catalan), elblogboyacense is only in Spanish. So pretty much, two completely different blogs.

The people of elblogboyacense were kind enough to share their visitor’s statistics with us for comparison purposes. We have plotted the visitors to both blogs per day (for the last 30 days), week and month (beware that elblogboyacense is a month younger than olivetalks. Also that we are only counting the posts of Monday for week 15th and only the 7 first days of the month for April, and hence the apparent decrease in visits in the last data point in each graph).

1. visitors per day

2. visitors per week

3. visitors per month

As you can see we are having approximately the same success! Both seem to be increasing at the same rate and have a similar average of visits per day (about 70 visits per day for olivetalks and 85 for elblogboyacense). In spite of blogging in completely different ways! Curious isn’t it? Just chance?

So if you want to spend two hours writing a post, you will probably be ok with only publishing every few days. On the other hand, if you prefer to write short posts, it might be better if you publish at least one, if not more, every day. And if you want to have regular readers, decide on the characteristics of your posts and your target audience, and always remember those characteristics when writing new posts.

What remains to be seen is the stats for a type c kind of blog. I have my eye on The Stork, The Guinea Pig & The Elephant, a new personal blog that started 2 weeks ago. I’ll try to convince the author to let me access his stats when it reaches two/three months of life. In the meantime, if any reader has a personal blog he/she would not mind comparing blog-type vs stat results with us, drop us a note!

PS. LadyRostand would like to thank the team of elblogboyacense for allowing her to use their Wordpress Stats for this article: Saludos y gracias desde olivetalks al equipo y los lectores de elblogboyacense.

Related post(s)

• The 5 stages of bloggers (3)
• How to feed Google properly (2)
• Security problem with WordPress (2)
• How to write a great blog post? (0)
• Today olivetalks celebrates three months (5)