Lessons Learned: Don’t neglect your followers
During the past few months, even the past year, my activity has not been closed to what it used to be here on the blog. This I’ve been very aware of. However I didn’t really consider or realize that I was actually neglecting the small but faithful following I had built up till that point. This made me think a little, and I felt I needed to say a few words about neglecting your followers.
cc-by *saxon*
Combined with listening to successful YouTube stars, such as Felicia Day with The Guild and gaming related channels such as The Cynical Brit TotalBiscuit, and my own lack of blogging I started to put a few things together. In interviews that I’ve listened to they would reveal the “big secret” to their success. The person I’ve heard explain how and why most often is TotalBiscuit. Basically it comes down to 3 things.
- Focus on something you want to do or enjoy. Your topic of choice
- Whatever you chose to do, make sure to update regularly (uploads on your YouTube channel, post on your blog, publish pictures, whichever it might be.)
- Be yourself, don’t try to be like someone else. Just because they are successful doing something a certain way doesn’t mean that will work for you. Your biggest shot is being yourself and gaining followers who like the way you do things.
So, where do my own revelations come in to this? My thoughts go along these lines:
Preferably your followers should know what type of content you will be providing them with as well, regularity helps here. For myself I realize that I might have lost parts of my following because I’m a bit of a jack of trades, and my interests switch quite a lot. Over the past 3 years as a blogger I have also been experimenting and exploring what type of writing I want to do.
This doesn’t mean you should focus or be putting out one type of content only, but should try to be clear about what would be mixed in. My niche can very well become that I’m diverse.
Last year I felt that maloki as a blog was established well enough among my followers and it was time to expand to writing more in English instead of Swedish and to write more about tech I updated and changed the tagline from “Tankar & funderingar” (“thoughts & musings”) to “… now with a splash of tech” as an attempt to give people a heads up on what was going on. Later on, most recently, I added gamings (instead of just writing it as gaming) to that tagline.
This was a good choice for me at the time, partly because I was communicating with a lot of people who were not native in Swedish, or even knew the language, who were interested in reading what I had to say. Also I really like writing in English. Don’t worry, I’m still going to stick with English.
How do I take care of my followers then? With the 3 points I previously stated in mind there’s not really much I can do other than, be consistent, with regular updates. Give you guys an idea of what I actually will be providing, when things change toss out an update. If I for some reason will be too busy I should let you know in advance or during, not 4 months after.
I will be covering topics that can be categorized under Games, Lifestyle, Politics and Tech. Which is quite wide, but it feels just right for me.
