There are many bloggers in the blogosphere who are doing pretty well with their blogs. Then, there are those who don’t seem to be going anywhere with their blog. Chances are, the bloggers who actually have something going for them have taken a very important step in reaching that success. Identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and making the best of each.
Identifying what you are good at when it comes to your blog is a very essential activity that will go a long way to improve your blogging flow. We are going to look at just how we can do this.
Identifying Your Strengths
To help identify your blogging strengths, you need to answer a couple of questions. I have compiled a short, but self-defining list of questions to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses blogging.
- When it comes to blogging and everything it includes (writing, promotion, maintenance, etc), what are you best at and what do you enjoy the most? What type of content or article types do you write well? What promotional technique(s) are you best at using? What ways of monetization works best for you?
- What advantages do you have over other blogs in the blogosphere? How many RSS subscribers do you have? How many Email subscribers do you have? What is your blog’s traffic ranking?
- What do you have more of that you can put into your blogging activities? Do you have time to blog? Do you have money to pay writers for your blog’s content? Do you have money to pay for your blog’s marketing?
- What do your blog’s readers commend you for when they leave a comment on your blog?
Finding the answers to the questions above will help you determine your strengths in blogging. You can write your answers on a piece of paper, or put them in a text document. A piece of paper will work for you because you can place it by your desk or anywhere around your home that you can review it. You must aim to provide absolutely honest answers to these questions.
After answering the questions, take a special note of anything you didn’t list in your answers. For example, if you answer that the promotional technique you are best at is social media marketing, then it means the other methods of marketing – guest blogging, search engine optimization and article marketing are some things you may want to work on improving. We will talk about weaknesses later on in this article.
Leveraging Your Strengths
Learning how to leverage your blogging strengths will help you make the most of your blogging activities. Leveraging gives you a big advantage over other blogs because you use your identified strengths to add more value to your blog.
To better understand leverage, let us look at the leverage China has over the manufacturing industry.
Many companies like Nike and Apple have set up manufacturing plants in China because China provides almost all of the resources (cheap labor, large labor market, cheap raw materials, etc.) needed to manufacture the products of these companies at an excellent price. Many retailers also purchase most of their items from Chinese wholesalers to sell them in their retail shop. China learned how to leverage their strengths (in this case, their resources) to their advantage and now they have taken over most global industries.
The following questions will help you find a way of leveraging your own blogging strengths to add more value to your blog.
- What do I want to achieve with my blog? How can I achieve my blogging goals using my strengths (expertise)?
- How can I get my blog’s visitors or email and RSS subscribers to promote my blog? Think of giving them something extra to motivate them to talk about your blog to others. You can host a contest with some stellar prizes. Preferably, give out a prize related to your niche.
- What other ways can I monetize my blog? You can think of selling products such as your own eBooks, plug-ins, website themes or services such as premium content (by paid subscriptions), writing or design services. These are just a few examples from me; don’t limit yourself to my ideas alone.
Leverage is all about adding options and improvements based on your strengths. You need to constantly aim at using your existing strengths to improve your blog. As the old adage goes, “use it or lose it.” You need to identify and use your strengths the best you can. Otherwise, you will lose that leverage on your strengths as a result of worrying too much about your weaknesses. Instead, work at using other alternatives to your weaknesses and aim at constant improvement in all areas of your blogging activities.
In your quest to leverage your strengths, remember to take your blog’s readers and visitors into consideration, especially when it comes to adding other monetization methods. You have to remember, without your community, your blog is nothing. So if you choose to throw banner ads all over the place, expect those ads to have a negative impact on your community.
Remember, that any change you make to your blog, someone may not like it. You can’t try to make everybody happy. Make choices you think will be most beneficial to your blog, and if someone doesn’t like it – it’s their loss for not supporting you trying to grow your blog.
Identifying Your Weaknesses
It is very important that you pick out your weaknesses in your blogging skill set. They are just as important to know as knowing your strengths – maybe even more important.
Do another self-analysis by answering the following questions below:
- What do your readers criticize you for?
- What are your worst traits when you are writing an article?
- What is the impact blogging has on your personal life?
- When it comes down to maintaining the technical aspects of your blog, what do you know?
- What holds you back when you really want to work on your blog?
- What are your competitors good at that you are not? (Of course, if you want your own uniqueness and not copy what they are doing, you don’t have to see this as a weakness)
Basically, your weaknesses are the things that affect your blogging career negatively. Write them on a piece of paper or note pad. Put them right under your list of strengths, because they are just as important to know as your strengths.
Making Improvements
Once you know what you excel at and what holds you back, it’s time to work towards improving your weaknesses. Do you have enough resources ready to improve your blog? Can you invest some time and maybe money to improve on your blogging weaknesses? You need to ask yourself questions to find out if you are really ready for improvement.
Even if you have a nagging edge for improvement, it is not enough because sometimes the feeling will be there but there wouldn’t be much time or available resources to go ahead with improvement.
The three basic things you will need in order to make a sound improvement on your weaknesses are:
- Mindset for improvement - Be willing to improve and think positively about the things you are doing. You won’t improve if you think you cannot improve. You need to have a vision for constant improvement of your blog..
- Time -You need a lot of time in order to make improvement. You need it because you will be spending much of it on improving upon your weaknesses.
- Education & Training - By this, I don’t necessarily mean going to college and earning a diploma or degree. Reading blogs for blogging tips and joining paid tutorial sites that teach you how to improve at something are all forms of education.
I didn’t include money because sometimes, it is not important. You may need money to create resources when you lack them though. For example, you may need money to pay for education (that is, if you opt to pay for tips rather than find free sources of information), you may also need money to buy someone else’s time (hire a consultant who can help improve your weakness) if you don’t have any time of your own.
I will however advise that you work on improving your blog on your own. If you get stuck, get someone to take you through the process and work on it yourself by following the process. It is better to learn and master it yourself than to pay someone else to make it better and keep on paying him or her to maintain that improvement again and again.
Final words
Tackle weaknesses one at a time. You don’t have to burn yourself out by trying to make two, three or even 10 improvements at a time. You may not get anywhere if you try to improve in many areas all at the same time.
Tackle your greatest weakness first. List which weakness you will want to tackle first in order of priority and you will do just great.
You can skip one weakness and tackle the next one if you are getting frustrated. For example, if you are getting frustrated designing your blog, take time off from it and work on something you think you will have more tolerance for. However, you do need to come back later on and work on that design. You should also note that some things take more time than other to improve, patience is a virtue here.
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Identifying strengths and weaknesses for yourself can be challenging to say the least, sometimes I ask for criticisms from fellow bloggers, family, and friends to help me be more objective and open about them.
Nice write up, most people don’t think to look that deep to help with their writing and social skills.
Keith´s last blog ..Do you Use Disqus Or Other Comment Sign In App?
Thanks Keith. I will be sure to check out your blog and offer my honest opinion
Kwame´s last blog ..What Value Does Your Blog Provide?
Informative article.
What does it mean when you do not get any comments? Does it mean the topic is not popular, not worth commenting on, too complicated to understand or does it mean that you are not well-known blogger so readers do not bother?
When should a new blogger start to get the idea thath he is heading the right way?
For Bloggers Who want to Stop Writers’ Block
Thanks for the compliment Nezine. To answer your questions, if you do not get any comments, it does not mean people are not reading it or that your article was not helpful. The thing is, it is not everybody who will like to leave a comment. Some articles are read over 100,000 times but get less than 100 comments. If your article is too complicated or not useful, most of the time, someone will leave a comment to let you know it sucks.
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You will know when you are going the right way when you get people saying good things about your articles in the comments are or elsewhere like a social media site. If people start sharing your content and subscribe to your blog, you are going the right way. However, you must know that it takes time to build a great blog. I hope I answered you well enough. If you want to know anything else, let me know
Kwame´s last blog ..What Value Does Your Blog Provide?
Are you promoting each article after you write them?
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
Yes Dennis, I promote each of my articles after I publish them.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
What is the best way to promote blog articles? Is there one method is far better than others?
Well Nezine, there are numerous ways of promoting your articles. You can read this article Seth Wrote sometime back here on Blogussion to get some ideas: http://www.blogussion.com/marketing/blog-promotion-marketing/
Look at the “Promoting Online” section. Remember that some techniques work for some people better than other techniques so you have to do some testing and see which techniques brings you the most targeted traffic and work at improving on it and then later, you can try the second technique you are good at and then improve on it.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Sorry Kwame, that question was for Nezine who seems to be having problems.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED – ONE MORE DAY & MORE BLOGS! Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
My best traffic generator to date is commenting around the net after each and every article posts. There are certain techniques I apply to it, but that’s the gist.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED – ONE MORE DAY & MORE DOMAINS! Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
No problem Dennis. I agree with you that using comments to promote your blog requires a lot of dedication and some technique if you want to realize any visits at all.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Great blog, you obviously put a lot of effort into writing your blogs. I agree with the point you make about time and needing to dedicate a lot of it to the blog if you want it to succeed!
Jez @ Mobile Phones with Free Laptop´s last blog ..Mobile Phone Free Laptop
Thanks Jez
. Putting effort into serving your blog’s readers by providing quality blog is a good thing to do if you want them to keep coming back for more. Finding time to blog is very important. Drawing a time-table for your blogging activities should be basically divided into three parts; time for researching, time for writing and time for promoting. If you can estimate how much time you need to do this or that, you will be able to draw a blog time-table that will work.
Kwame´s last blog ..What Value Does Your Blog Provide?
Constant improvement is the way to go. You just have to have the right mindset if you intend to make it as blogger. Unfortunately improvement takes time, and you can not rush things.
Blog Handbook´s last blog ..Simple Blog SEO Tips for Beginners
Exactly. Improvement is not easy but it always proves to be worthwhile. Ask any expert
. Thanks for commenting.
Kwame´s last blog ..What Value Does Your Blog Provide?
Identifying your weaknesses is a crucial part of improving your chances for success is just about any venture you undertake. The most important part of this, though, is the ability to be brutally honest with yourself on what those weaknesses are. This is much easier said than done.
An old standby thing to do in sales/marketing organizations is a SWOT analysis. Again, be BRUTALLY honest with your strengths and weaknesses, then you will better informed when it comes to knowing how to address them or make them work for you.
Chad @ Tech201´s last blog ..Forget All Those Folders and Stay Organized With Desktop Search.
Yes Chad. Thanks for the addition
. Your blog looks great.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Nice share guys! As always you’ve got some great content posted here, I’ll have to share it on Blogger Den as Blogussion is pretty popular with the community over there.
Blogger Den´s last blog ..6 Steps to Follow to Make Money Online
Thanks Blogger Den. Blogussion has an awesome community and is getting even more popular as the days go by.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Knowing our own strengths and weaknesses not only good for blogging but to our life too.
Jayce´s last blog ..How to hack Facebook account profile
Yep. You are right Jayce. Thanks for mentioning this
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
If we don’t know our strengths and weaknesses, we can’t go further anyway, just as I mentioned in one of my post: The First Thing of Online Business and Anything is to Understand Yourself.
Thanks for sharing your article David.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Really great article which tell us to use our strengths and weakness to achieve success in blogging. And i find this article also can use in other field too. It is always great to know our strength and our weakness, and it is greatest if we find how to use both of it.
Dana @ Blogging Update´s last blog ..How To Get Google AdSense Code
Your compliments and additions are very much appreciated Dana. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses enables you to know where you have to improve.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
The another point is what we have to keep in mind the analyze our visitors, from where they are coming, if visitor coming from search engine by searching for some keyword to our blog and we do not write the things what they want then we should write on that topic on our next post.
I am not a good writer but try to improve my writing by learning from other.
chandan´s last blog ..List of Edu blogs
You are doing a great job by trying to improve on your writing Chandan. Your efforts will be worthwhile in the end. Trust me.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Blogging could be a good way to work on your strengths, yes you examine your weaknesses, then figure out your strengths and figure out how to move your weaknesses into the strengths!
Link Exchange Forum´s last blog ..hi guys
No better way to say it. One thing I have noticed is that we are all in some kind of beta mode. Nothing is ever in a perfect state. Even the big websites and blogs online still work at improving their assets. So we are all moving from beta to better. Keep that in mind
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Hey I like that!
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED – ONE MORE DAY & MORE DOMAINS! Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
Wow! You have provided a great information for me as a new blogger. I will try to follow what you have recommended to improve my new blog. Thanks for sharing!
Kok Siong Chen´s last blog ..Autosomal Aneuploidy – Cytogenetic Abnormalities
I am glad you find the article useful. You should subscribe to Blogussion to get updated when new articles are posted.
Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Finding weakness always good and that I do in each Sunday but in my case I compare my skill with another same niche blogger and try to find where they are good and where I am better. This help me to graph my work for upcoming days. By the way, you really done a great job and explain it deeply. Thanks for this high quality thoughtful article.
Arafat Hossain Piyada´s last blog ..Photovisi – Lets You Create Your Own Photo Collage Online Free
Thanks for the compliment and thanks for reading Arafat
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
I’d say my main strength is writing. I enjoy doing it and get many compliments on both content and style…getting kudos for style is very important, especially if you’re different from most.
My main weakness is anything of a design/graphical nature…this was obvious from a very early age when I couldn’t draw within the lines. LOL. Funny perhaps, but it does follow you. I outsource this.
All the other stuff, SEO, Promotion, etc., and so forth has been weak, but not a weakness if that makes sense…I seem to use up my time writing. This is already being put into the plans for 2010.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
I have looked at your blog and I think you are doing pretty well. You are right when you say “not a weakness if that makes sense”. The main reason why I blog is to help people find solutions to what they may not know. I learn from my own experiences and the experience of other people and share it with those who do not have the experience yet. If just 1 person comes to read your blog and leaves one comment that shows that he or she is satisfied, you should be satisfied too. I am now drawing my plans for 2010. Thanks for commenting Dennis
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
It appears we blog for the same reasons, which is good.
I definitely don’t lack for comments, that part is pretty well mastered. Time for me to move on to other avenues.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED – ONE MORE DAY & MORE BLOGS! Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
Congratulations Dennis. I like your vibrance and enthusiasm on here
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Btw, excellent article. My guest post door is open if you’re interested.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
Okay Dennis. I will add you to my list
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
Sweet; lookin’ forward to it.
Dennis Edell´s last blog ..UPDATED – ONE MORE DAY & MORE BLOGS! Again – Pick My New Domain Names With A chance To Win $10!
I like your concept on discovering first all your strengths and weaknesses so you can make any necessary improvements. In this way, you’ll be able to get a positive result that can surely make your readers appreciate you more.
Mark´s last blog ..School Grants For Minorities
I totally agree with you Mark. The main aim is to create a satisfied community. Thanks for the compliment and addition
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..Google Brings “Olympics” To Webmasters; Are You On Your Mark?
That’s true. I like writing more than promoting. However, promoting is the part that will get traffic and backlinks.
No matter, a balance is needed.
scheng1´s last blog ..Baby and Fresh Air
It’s important to find a balance between your blogging activities and you need to be a good time manager before you can have that balance. Thanks for commenting Scheng and Happy New Year to everyone here
!
Hi kwame… is finding our strength and weakness like using SWOT analysis method? thanks for sharing the idea..
ysfirdaus´s last blog ..December 2009 Blogging Recap
Yes, it’s part of SWOT analysis.
My biggest weakness is the strain that blogging has caused between my friends and I. My personal life has taken a huge hit which is ironic since I blog from social locations like coffee shops. I really need to work on this before the conditions become worse. thanks for writing the article, it really opened my eyes up.
JennaM´s last blog ..Lindsey – Day and Night
Tanks to you too for reading the article Jenna. I just checked out your blog and I think you are doing a fantastic job there; very inspiring content, generally speaking. More grease to your elbows
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nice informative post, I am a beginner in blogging,, the post is very useful for me
Orkut Scraps´s last blog ..How do you celebrate the New Year
Glad you loved it
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This is very useful for me as a novice blogger. Thanks for posting this! I will surely benefit from this as I grow in the blogosphere.
Arden´s last blog ..5 Hindrances Of Regular Posting
Glad you found it useful
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Kwame Boame´s last blog ..25 Underground Industry and Hobby Specific Social Networks You May Never Have Heard Of