Do you Hold Back Your Best Content?
It happens to me from time to time. As I sit down and begin to write a blog post, I start to feel like this could be one of my best pieces of work yet. Then I am faced with a dilemma. Should I post this now, despite having very little readership, or should I wait and deliver this gem once my audience is bigger.
I’ve arrived at two different ways of thinking about this problem.
If I was to publish such great content now then it would attract more readers to my blog. Oppositely if I post it now and not many people see it, then it may become buried. After that point it will be much harder to resurrect it when I have more fans. It may even become lost forever. Which leaves me in a difficult position.
I have tried both methods with some measure of success and also with great failures.
One time I posted the article and I saw a dramatic increase in my readership. Another time I was very confident that it was going to be a great article and not only did it fail to bring in new readers, I actually saw a decrease in traffic. Needless to say I was quite disappointed and I thought it would have been better to wait until I had more traffic coming through to post it. It’s difficult to know what is going to be a success and what is not.
I haven’t come up with a steadfast rule yet but currently I take a look at my last week or so’s posts to see how much powerful content I’ve had already. If it’s been a good week then I might feel more inclined to save it for a slow news day.
What’s your strategy when it comes to you best content? Do you put it all out whenever you can, or do you save something special for later? Let me know in the comments.
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I try to get it in the world as fast as possible ! I don't wanna be addicted to Brain Crack ! (Ze Frank)
1I'm now also with this dilemma, my blog is very, very new (4 days old in fact) and I'm publishing now some very good posts as I think right for the beginning, where I don't have any audience yet.
2But I think, this still can be corrected by promoting those good, old blog posts in the right way or adding them to the sidebar as “featured posts” or something like that.
So my tactic is primarily now to deliver the best content to get a readership built.
Since you are so new that's probably the best tactic. The more you keep at it, the more you will learn so the first few months there is usually a lot to write about.
I recommend using Related Posts and Popular posts to get people to read through your older content once they arrive at your blog.
3Yes, I sometimes do hold back my best content, although it depends what it is and it's relevance at that particular time. There are peak times on the site, so I like to keep such content back until then.
4You could definitely bring back your old articles. I have done this before in weekly/monthly rambling posts on bloggin-ads in the past. It brings traffic back to old posts :)
5