Bloggers Must Evolve Or Die

My daughter asked me to speak with her about how old she needs to be to get a Facebook account and to teach her about blogging and social media.

We had the usual conversation about what you should or should not post online and talked about why some bloggers last and others don’t.

I gave her my standard answer about how if you are not blogging for work you need to have fun or you won’t last and then told her that you have to be flexible because things change quickly in cyberspace.

Both comments are true but there is a problem with the second one because it makes an assumption about what constitutes a successful blog.

That assumption is one that says success is based upon traffic and that if you are not generating comments and or shares you are not producing the right content.

But that is not necessarily true.

Why?

It makes an unsubstantiated assumption about what bloggers are trying to do with their blog and that is a mistake.

Instead of having a discussion about goals and objectives it leaps right into the sort of presumption I prefer to avoid.

Some of us use our blogs as places to generate conversation and commentary about things that interest us. Others use them as marketing devices.

While it is true that if you don’t know why you are blogging you can’t develop a plan or objective it is also true you don’t necessarily have to have one.

You really can do this for fun or because it serves as a tool to keep your writing skills sharp. You can do it for intellectual stimulation.

None of those necessarily require an objective, just a willingness to sit down at the keyboard and publish content.

I use this joint for all of these purposes and more.

Bloggers Must Evolve Or Die

If we circle back to the initial premise that bloggers must evolve or die I would argue I have been following that.

When I launched this particular blog it started out with a clear focus on business and social media. That was intentional on my part but so was my decision to mix things up a bit.

I knew I was one of millions of people covering these topics and worried about getting caught up in the noise and the echo chamber.

So I mixed things up because I found it more interesting and was confident you would do too.

There have been multiple commenting systems installed and or deactivated here because I have made a point to look for the ones that worked best for you and for me.

The 12 posts below do a nice job of highlighting much of that.

1. Is Commenting On Blogs Dead?
2. How Long Does It Take To Build A Community?
3. How To Write a Speech For Your Son’s Bar Mitzvah
4. How Do You Scam A Scammer?
5. Is It Really More Fun To Be Evil?
6. How Much Does 50 Tons of Bagels Weigh?
7. How Long Does It Take To Build A Successful Blog
8. Once We Were Kings
9. The Importance Of Writing For People
10. What Is The Hardest Part Of Blogging?
11. Are You Suffering From The Echo Chamber Effect?
12. Do You Still Read Books/Magazines?

The Real Message of This Post/Conversation

The real message of this post and my conversation with my daughter was the need to be willing to roll with the punches and change as needed.

When our conversation started it wasn’t my intent to try and turn it into a teaching moment but I took a father’s prerogative to try and teach his children and ran with it.

The ability to go along and get along goes a long way in life in general not just social media.

What do you think?