We’ve all seen it and most of us have experienced it first hand. Dormant Blog Syndrome. A blog that started out as a promising and exciting new venture slowly runs aground and goes without any posts for months on end. Like an abandoned lighthouse, the lights are still on but nobody is home.
It’s happened to me on my personal blog, Brass Revolver. I thought of the name in 2001. Brass relating to my profession as a trumpet player and Revolver relating to the intended nature of the blog, shooting on life as a professional musician. It was intended to be an honest and open narrative that, I thought, would be interesting to fellow professional musicians and anyone interested in the music industry.
Many years of other more important projects and much procrastination later, brassrevolver.com went live towards the beginning of 2007. My spectacular fall out with Dreamhost in the summer of 2007 pretty much destroyed any momentum that had been built up and, from then on, my personal blog has taken a back seat to all of my other projects.
The trouble is, once you start having big gaps in your blog posts, gaps of over a month for instance, it can be very difficult to pull things back in line. Your blog becomes dormant.
Thankfully there is a cure for Dormant Blog Syndrome.
Blog Bankruptcy.
Not as savage nor as stupid as Email Bankruptcy, Blog Bankruptcy is a genuine workable solution and is very easy to implement.
First of all you need to write a simple blog post declaring Blog Bankruptcy. Draw a line in the sand officially on your blog explaining your reasons for you blog’s dormancy.
Next, write a second blog post outlining a blog posting plan. A bit like an Individual Voluntary Agreement used by credit companies when dealing with debt that has got out of hand. Tell your readers that you are going to stick to a regular posting schedule. You decide what that schedule is, daily posts, weekly posts, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you don’t over promise or you will end up back where you started.
Once you have publicly declared Blog Bankruptcy and publicly promised to commit to a regular posting schedule you fill feel much more inclined to treat your blog with the respect it deserves.
Earlier today I declared Blog Bankruptcy over on my personal blog, Brass Revolver. You can read the post here.
If you’ve got a blog that has been struck with Dormant Blog Syndrome and would like to declare Blog Bankruptcy with a little extra publicity then leave a comment below with a link to your blog and grab some new readers.
