When A Post Flops – Let’s Talk Bookish

Hi friends, welcome back to the blog! It’s been a while. The semester is thankfully halfway over, and the break will soon finally be here. I hope the past month has been kind to you all, and if not, hopefully this month will be much better.

It’s Friday, and I’m back to finally participate in LTB after so long. Quick note: I missed out on posting the topics for December last week, but you can find Dani’s announcement for them here, and I’ll work on adding them to the official Let’s Talk Bookish page hopefully by the end of today.

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme hosted by me and Dani @ Literary Lion where we discuss certain topics, share our opinions, and spread the love by visiting each other’s posts. Today’s topic is about when blog posts don’t do very well. Join in on this meme by writing your own discussion on the topic, and sharing your link using the inLinkz available here.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

The prompt for this topic is:

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 feel like every blogger has experienced this at one point or another. There’s always that one post that you put so much effort and time into writing and editing and designing, and you’re so. proud. of it, and can’t wait to share it with the world so everyone can enjoy all the effort you put in.

But then you do share it with the world and…the world doesn’t seem to care.

It hurts.

It really does.

And I think the way that it hurts is different depending on how long you’ve been blogging.

During my baby days as a newbie blogger, I decided to write a discussion post since I’d found a topic that I felt that I had a right to talk about. This was just my second month of blogging, and I’d been having some engagement with my other posts and I’d seen that discussions were popular in the community. So, I figured that I’d try my hand at writing one and was super excited for the comments that I knew would surely come.

I still acutely remember how worried I was when I was editing the post, and how I almost didn’t publish it because I felt like no one would care to read it. I’m just a tiny new blogger, who would care about my relatively inconsequential opinion?

Eventually, the post went live. The eager nervous waiting began. During those days, I watched my stats like a hawk; I was obsessed with the numbers, with getting comments and I always had a part of my brain trained and waiting for every new notification.

Nothing happened.

No comments.

No pingbacks.

No engagement.

It wasn’t until 3 months later that I finally got a comment on the post and by then, my initial excitement about foraying into the world of discussions had been completely and wholly crushed.

For me, as a new blogger, it made me feel insecure about my position within the community. Yes, I was just two months into it, but I was young, foolish, and naïve. To be perfectly honest, I’d hoped that the discussion would put my blog out there, and I’d suddenly get a boom in stats and followers and I would reach the level of all the bloggers that I adored.

Of course, that discussion didn’t do that. I didn’t get any comments at all on it initially, and it was just so crushing. I nearly took it down, because I figured that if I couldn’t even get one comment, then maybe I’d said something wrong or I was just that bad at writing discussions.

It also made me not want to write another discussion ever again.

Obviously, I eventually did write another discussion and then I started LTB, so I’ve kind of gotten over that. But I still remember how much it hurt me as a new blogger.

Now that I’ve been blogging for a few years, when a post that I was very excited to write doesn’t do well, i hide and disappear from the blogosphere I think I deal with it a lot better because it’s not the first time that it’s happened. It definitely still hurts and rattles my confidence, but I try to approach it logically and analyze the situation to figure out why the post flopped.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t been engaging with the community lately*, perhaps the usual people who would comment on my posts aren’t around/are on hiatus, or perhaps it was just not a good day and the comments will come a little bit later.

* Mini Side Tangent

As much as we read each other’s posts because we love to, I think it’s also a give and take relationship where if someone comments on another person’s post, then they feel “obliged” to return the favor. It’s not obliged in a bad sense, it’s like it reminds them to check on the person’s blog and then they find something that they like and therefore comment on and the cycle of blog hopping and engagement in the community keeps going.

I feel like when you don’t bloghop, at least consistently, then it’s kind of easier for people to not remember to check on your posts.

But that’s what I’ve personally noticed. Does the same happen for you? Let me know in the comments below!

And sometimes I think that the timing of when I schedule a post matters as well, though I’m not 100% sure about that, but it’s another thing I consider. Maybe I posted it at a time I don’t usually post at and that could have contributed to the lack of engagement.

If you try multiple posts that are related to whatever it is that you wanted to talk about originally and they all don’t do that well, then I guess it’s a sign that your readers don’t really want to read about that.

Which is horrible, since you would love to write about it all day, but that’s the sad part about being content creators. Of course, it’s possible to find some readers who actually do love that kind of post and would read it, but not every post is going to work with all your readers.

One thing that I try to do if a post flops is to try and drive traffic to that post by mentioning it in other posts that I know will get good engagement. If people love your monthly wrap-ups and you get a lot of interaction with that, make sure you include the post that flopped there and talk about how much you loved writing it, and hopefully more people might go check it out.

You never know, it might just have been a bad day, or some readers might have missed it or forgotten that they were going to reply to it, so always keep that in mind and try not to take it to heart.

Lastly, I think it’s important that we remember why we’re blogging in the first place. Yes, getting engagement gives us validation, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be a do or die matter where if one post we were excited about doesn’t succeed, we give up on blogging altogether or we don’t try doing a similar post in the future.

Blogging can be tough, and there will be good times and bad times. Some posts will do better than others. Some that you’re excited about and proud of might not get the response that you want, but you just have to try and not let that define you or your worth as a blogger.

Some questions for you:

• It’s been a while, so let’s chat: how have you been?
• Have you ever experienced a post flopping? How did you handle it/what did you do? Do you think new and seasoned bloggers will react to a post not doing well differently?
• Do you think there’s a give and take relationship when it comes to engagement in the community?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!