Letting a blog/ebook die?

[sophali]

Hello everyone,

I've known about this forum for ages but tonight finally felt drawn to posting here. I've had some questions about my career but it's more personal development centered than career centered.

I'm an online ghostwriter by trade, which I am grateful for. I've been able to stay home with my children, we took my husband's lay off in March in stride, he's now back in school and I'm making more than we did combined....but I feel kind of stuck.

I know that eventually I want to move from ghostwriting to publishing on my own, and maybe even out of writing professionally. I wrote one book on ghostwriting and started a blog on writing in 07. I was proud of them at the time, and wanted to help other moms. I had a run in with a powerful blogger who raked me over the coals in late 07 and I'm ashamed to admit, it shook me to the core. I've posted about 10 to 15 times since then but have let the blog die.

At the end of the day, I realized that I'm at a point where I need to advance my writing and marketing knowledge. Since I put myself out there as an "expert" of sorts, I'm afraid to blog anymore since I feel I have no advice beyond what I am learning from others right now. I've tapped out my personal knowledge.

I do have a lot of affiliates for the book and get a sale or two each month. I get pretty good feedback (2 complaints in the last two years), so I don't want to abandon the ebook.....but how do I bow out of the blog gracefully?

[Brutha]

How much readers does your blog get?

[CoolBee]

And not just how many readers but do you get any feedback on how valuable they may or may not find the information on your blog?

Maybe it would be worth bundling the blog posts up as a downloadable and adding it to the ebook as a supplement so that your work doesn't go totally to waste.

I'm having the same thoughts about letting my coolbees blog die because frankly I don't do anything with it, much more focused on my oldbag blog which has a good niche online following. Either that or revamp and overhaul the whole thing and give it an aim in life!

[runningbird]

Excuse my ignorance of this metaphor: does "raked me over the coals" mean he severely criticized you? I understand how that could be upsetting, but it's out of your hands. Maybe it will even bring some attention to you that you could transform into something positive when people actually see your work.

As far as ideas for things to write about, there is no rationing on inventiveness. You can share your own insights or analysis of marketing techniques, or even better, make your own experiments and share the results. Maybe try "SCAMPER":

* S = Substitute
* C = Combine
* A = Adapt
* M = Magnify
* P = Put to Other Uses
* E = Eliminate (or Minify)
* R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER

[CoolBee]

Hehe I love SCAMPER - I use it for option generation.

[OlderWiser]

Originally Posted by sophali

I had a run in with a powerful blogger who raked me over the coals in late 07 and I'm ashamed to admit, it shook me to the core. I've posted about 10 to 15 times since then but have let the blog die.

Well, I don't know what that "powerful" blogger said/did, but it seems to me they accomplished what they set out to do, which was intimidate you into silence. They don't seem too powerful to me, if they have to resort to tactics like this.

Originally Posted by sophali

Since I put myself out there as an "expert" of sorts, I'm afraid to blog anymore since I feel I have no advice beyond what I am learning from others right now. I've tapped out my personal knowledge.

Sometimes writing about what you've gleaned from other sources works just as well. You can gather up the information and present it in a unified way that's easy to read. It saves your readers from having to read a bunch of other sources.

Originally Posted by sophali

I do have a lot of affiliates for the book and get a sale or two each month. I get pretty good feedback (2 complaints in the last two years), so I don't want to abandon the ebook.....but how do I bow out of the blog gracefully?

Do you really want to do that? if so, you just make a blog post stating that your interests have taken new forms and new directions, you want to concentrate your effort and energy on new projects, and you won't be updating the blog any more. If you intend to keep it online, then also mention that you'll be doing that so that past articles and references will still be available. Thank your viewers and stop posting. It's pretty straightforward, really.

[rocksupreme]

How much profit do you make on a sale? Budget just that much in an AdWords campaign to drive some traffic to your sales page. If your sales page is well-written, you should make a few sales. Refund your ad campaign.

If you don't want to blog anymore, there are other ways to get people to buy your ebook. Just replace the blog with a long-form sales letter and tweak your copy until you convert enough traffic to let AdWords run on autopilot.

It takes some keyword research, good copywriting skills, and some tweaking, but it can be done. Just practice until you get it right.

[sophali]

Thanks for all of the feedback. To answer a few questions, I have 90 people in my reader but it's been about six months since I got an honest comment. I've been averaging every month to every two weeks for posting.

The blogger who I had the incident with made some valid points. He is a well respected person in the field, so it's not as if he came out of left field with his attacks. In fact, my business has evolved because of his points.....but I'm left not being able to do much with the blog.

I do refer to it throughout the ebook and point to specific points, but I make it clear that the blog is very rarely used. So, I don't think leaving a post as olderwiser suggested would be that bad....it wouldn't shy future ebook buyers away.

Thank you for the suggestions on coming up with content...I just feel there is a lot of noise in the blogging world and not substance. Keeping it dragging along in order to perhaps sell a few more ebooks doesn't make much sense to me. The ebooks sales have been from affiliates mainly and I'm not even sure if the blog is a factor at all.

I'm just tired of pretending I'll get back to it and then never doing it. It's one more think to feel guilty about.

Thank you so much for helping me think this through.

[rocksupreme]

In that case, you don't need to the blog. Just update the book to include the content that you have on the blog now. Call it a "New, expanded edition." Then the blog will be useless. Let your affiliates and some ads drive traffic to your domain, and replace the blog with a simple sales letter.

Fewer headaches, and probably more money.

[sophali]

There's no content on the blog that is necessary for the book...the two are separate entities, they are just in the same niche. It's just referred to as a resource. I just didn't want links in the book that people have now to go to an empty or changed domain. Whenever I see that it raises my eyebrows a bit about the authority of the person.

[KenBWM]

Was this person that raked you over the coals feeling that you were being a threat to their authority or readers? Did they strike out at you because they thought you were their competition?

Very often that is how people react when they feel threatened. Remember that the bigger and more popular you get the more criticism you will receive.

Maybe they accomplished their goal of getting you to stop blogging by raking you over the coals???

The event is only as important or meaningful as you allow it to be.

[CoolBee]

Well if you are maintaining a website elsewhere, you could put the blog content or equivalent new thing that you deem appropriate on that, and use a domain redirector so that if they click/type the URL in the book, they will be 'seamlessly' transferred to the new place.

eg for example: I own coolbeesplace . net so if you go to that URL you get my coaching website. If you use coolbeesplace . co . uk you get the same thing as it redirects exactly there (and I prefer to use the .co .uk designation for this purpose)

I also own coolbeesplace . com this in fact redirects to a sub-domain called science. coolbeesplace. net and has my research on it. I do have another couple of sub-domains also which redirect there but I shan't bore you with the details.

If I decide to do away with my coolbeesplace . blogspot then I am planning to use a redirect for that.

Many people use domain re-directs - not sure why you think it raises questions about the person's authority?

I did it for my science one because my host provider of the original site disappeared overnight without warning taking all my files before it so I had to open a free blog, put a message on there to that effect and how to contact me while I restored the site on new servers.

Also, using re-directs means you can be a lot more flexible if you rely on your website and there is a major fault on the host servers or if you simply just want to change hosts!

If you have backup content elsewhere, you can just redirect the domain until the problem on your main host is sorted. Takes a few hours or so (sometimes a bit longer) for the redirects to propogate around the DNS servers.

[sophali]

KenBWM - Yep...I'm sure that's why he did it. And I have been trying hard to get over it. It clarified for me that I didn't want to be part of the "teaching people to write" niche. In the long run it's been a good thing, but this trailing end has been nagging me.

CoolBee- Thanks for the suggestion. I may do that in the future. That way I'd still be getting the traffic but not have to maintain the blog.

[Andrew Michaels]

What is your blog?

[sophali]

It's webwritinginfo.com.

I realized as I thought more about it this weekend that my main problem with the site is that it's the first thing that comes up when someone searches for my name. So if a writing client searches for my name a lot of teaching about writing and make money online stuff comes up, which i feel might hurt my credibility.

I saw a writer's site this weekend that was a static site but had a blog component attached. Although I have other domains for writing I might mimic that and just take the mmo content and put it on another site.

But of course this is all plans...I need to follow through!

[Henri J]

Originally Posted by sophali

At the end of the day, I realized that I'm at a point where I need to advance my writing and marketing knowledge. Since I put myself out there as an "expert" of sorts, I'm afraid to blog anymore since I feel I have no advice beyond what I am learning from others right now. I've tapped out my personal knowledge.

I do have a lot of affiliates for the book and get a sale or two each month. I get pretty good feedback (2 complaints in the last two years), so I don't want to abandon the ebook.....but how do I bow out of the blog gracefully?

Are you bowing out just because you're afraid? I'm going to be blunt... who cares if you feel tapped out? It's just a feeling and often not even true. Just start writing about what you're learning at the moment or ask people to send in questions and answer those. There are millions of ways you can do this and if you're really passionate about writing I don't see why you should bow out.

There are plenty of blogs out there that write about other people's stuff, but they inject their personality into it, which makes it fun and engaging to read. Since you're a copywriter, you probably are awesome at writing engaging copy. If you're bowing out because you're afraid people won't like you or something like that (I don't really know), then you will run into the same fear wherever you go, because the fear is inside your head, not outside, so it can pop up whenever it wants in whatever form it wants.

My thoughts

P.S. Just checked your website and realized that I know you... well a bit at least. We've spoken through email. I think you're awesome.

[sophali]

I think that is most definitely a factor. Fear played a big part of my silence. But it's been almost two years since that whole confrontation and I've made a half dozen posts. I think it's grown past fear to something different. The blog has lost it's usefulness.

I've realized since I first made this post that I want to change focus from making the blog to other writers to making the blog toward potential clients. I think that was a big stopping point...I had nothing else to say to other writers, but I have tons to say to people who want to market their business online through content.

Thank you all for being a good sounding board.

[borisg]

I like your writing style. Why would you let some moron have so much power over you? Change nothing. Keep going.