Attention Fellow Bloggers
The number of angling blogs appears to grow daily. Some are good, some are lousy, while some are a disgrace and appear to exist only so that the blogger can castigate and denigrate whoever he dislikes most this week. There’s no doubting they’re very popular right now and each attracts its own group of followers.
The idea of a blog is you attract a community of fellow minded souls who follow your writings and the very worst and bitter blogs seem to manage that quickest of all. The bitter and disenfranchised soon find other scandal mongers and ambulance chasers in their favourite haunts.
Whether the new wave of bloggers will stay the course is anyone’s guess, but writing one is only the beginning, making a success of it is another entirely. But how do you succeed? And what is success? And more to the point, how do you avoid getting sued?
I came across this film today and I would urge every angling blogger out there to make the time to watch it. It’s a long clip at 48 minutes but it will be time well invested if you are serious about your blogging. Just pick out the points that best relate to you and go from there:
In the film you’ll find advice on:
Creating a community and serving that community
Leading readers and creating change
Increasing traffic
Hostility and negativity
Laying down rules and terms of use
Agreeing a moderating policy
The asshole per thousand factor
Flipping the hate
Topic police
Who owns the content of comments
Who carries the risk of libel in those comments
Should you delete or edit comments
Honouring different viewpoints so long as it is done politely
Using common sense
Staying true to yourself
Moreover, the key question you may want to ask after watching this is why am I blogging in the first place? On the other hand it may help you to take a giant step forwards.
Hi Bob,
Some interesting stuff in this piece.
I decided the minute I went live with my website that the whole vibe would be a happy one, because by and large thats how I am.
Under no circumstances would I court controversy and turn people off because much to some peoples surprise the vast majority do not like confrontation, it turns them off the blog and the person.
Since I started I’ve only deleted a couple of messages and thats simply because the sender does not exist in my world.
I would probably do the same if I received other unwanted messages but that has not happened.
I get a lot of visitors, hundreds in a day, I’m pleased with that.
Many send emails rather than leave messages and that’s cool by me.
A blog shows the real you to whoever is interested and the more you show the more interested people become.
Hopefully I’m in it for the long run, its hard work as you know only too well but the rewards when people participate in a friendly and courteous manner make it worthwhile.
So we’ll keep blogging!
Steve