5 Tips for When a Blog Post Doesn’t Do Very Well // Let’s Talk Bookish

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books and Dani @ Literary Lion where we discuss certain topics based on prompts allocated for each Friday of the week. You basically share your opinions and get into the conversation by visiting each other’s posts. You can find the November schedule here or here.

Today’s Let’s Talk Bookish topic is When a post doesn’t do very well, which was suggested by Nicole @ Thoughts Stained With Ink.

I sort of dropped off my discussion posts bandwagon when life got a bit busy, but I am back! Today’s topic is pretty subjective and I get the feeling it will be a discussion on the shorter end of the spectrum but I am determined to have fun either way!

IMAGINE YOU’VE SPENT SEVERAL HOURS, EVEN DAYS, PERFECTING A POST THAT YOU’RE SO EXCITED TO PUBLISH. FINALLY, YOU HIT PUBLISH AND EAGERLY AWAIT THE RESPONSE. BUT THE RESPONSE IS NOT AS MUCH AS YOU’D EXPECTED, OR WORSE, IT’S NONEXISTENT. HAS THAT HAPPENED TO YOU BEFORE? HOW DO YOU HANDLE POOR POST RESULTS? DO YOU THINK THERE’S USUALLY A CAUSE FOR POOR POST RESULTS?

I think it is safe to say that we book bloggers have probably faced this situation at least a couple of times by now. We are a small-ish community and we most depend on each other for company (plus the book industry), so it is perfectly normal to have this happen to us. Here are a few tips I found useful in my year and a half of book blogging that will hopefully provide some comfort and help to you as well.

This is the tactic I use most frequently because it is sort of hard to avoid the big picture. Think about how many book blogs you follow and about how often or how irregularly you check up on updates and new posts that have gone up. I use WordPress Reader to stay up to date on the 100+ book blogs I follow and there are at least twenty-something posts that pop up daily.

Now I don’t get the time every morning or night to go through my Reader every day, so I miss out a few days. Usually, if I know I love someone’s content and actively try to keep up with their blog, I will go back and check on them, but for the most part, if I missed it on those odd days off blog-hopping, I missed it.

So, remember that it isn’t personal. It’s not that people have grown bored of your content or are regretting following you. It’s more likely that they did not see your post go up.

This tip seems like a standard book blogging tip but this helps your posts, this helps everyone’s posts! As I said before, I follow an overwhelming number of book blogs. The thing about following 100+ blogs is that you won’t make friends or socialise with every single blogger. Some you’ll follow for the content, some for their blogger personality, some for their style, et cetera et cetera.

From this, you’ll have a bunch that become actual buddies and who you’ll check up on regularly. I know I do! The secret is to comment and say what you want to say about their content. Of course, if you wanna say mean things, better just stay off their blogs in the first place. But tell them what you love about their post, about anything you found relatable, anything you would tell a friend or an acquaintance during a conversation.

But be relevant! Those creepy random “Hi!” messages could easily be spam or troublemakers that no one wants to engage with!

This is not a surefire way of attracting more traffic and getting more views on your blog or basically any SEO tricks that I am certainly way too underqualified to dish out. I am just going to say what I have noticed works on me!

I like long titles. I like titles that tease. Rather than saying a post is a book review and leaving it at that, I am more likely to open your post when you tease bits of the story in the title too, like “my new favourite enemies-to-lovers” or “worst thing I have ever read”.

This tip sounds weird at first given the context of this point but let me explain: you should congratulate yourself on publishing a post that you are happy with.

If you are like me, you probably like to try new things with your posts, making each one prettier and more elegant than the post before. You might even be notorious for comparing yourself to every other book blogger out there and trying to match up. You might have this dream of what you want your blog to look like one day and you are slowly building yourself up to it.

So, if you worked hard on a post that you deemed pretty, perfect and the best work you have done so far, well done! You’ve done the most difficult bit of this job and you should give yourself a good pat on the back.

As I said before, it can be pretty difficult to get noticed on WordPress Reader when your followers follow hundreds of others as well. So, don’t be afraid to show off a bit on your social media. If you’re like me and you use Bookstagram alongside your blog, then that’s a more engaging platform dedicated to books, so use it! You’ve got a Pinterest? Share your post there! Facebook? Share! Twitter? Share!

You’ve done a stint of hard work on this post, so do not be shy to go out there and tell them I did this great thing, so go check it out!

But here’s the thing: do not force people to read your stuff. I have come across a few people who will hound your DMs to get people to read their stuff, and that’s just not how it’s done. Be polite and considerate.

Have you got any tips for when a blog post doesn’t do very well? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

My previous Let’s Talk Bookish posts:

• October 15: 5 Overused Book Tropes
• October 8: 3 Cut and Paste Character Archetypes I Am Getting Tired Of
• October 1: A Book Series Versus A Standalone
• September 3: Male Versus Female Protagonists In Books
• August 27: Having A Blogger Identity Crisis