Sunday, March 6, 2011

Anybody Got Suggestions for Improvement?

I attended a meeting of the Atlanta bloggers meetup.com group the other day.  Unfortunately, due to getting out of the office late and taking the train to the wrong MARTA station*, I missed a substantial chunk of the meeting.

*I went to the North Avenue station and walked several blocks when it turns out the Midtown station is right next to the restaurant.  At least I saved gas and didn't need to worry about my car...

I pick up some interesting suggestions.  One of them is to set up a Twitter account to accumulate followers and, I assume, cross-pollinate with the blog (refer Twitter folk here and blog-followers to Twitter).  I'll be sure to do that, but not right now.

The most relevant suggestion to this post, however, is to ask your readers for feedback.  So....

1. What parts of my blog do you all like?

2. What parts do you all dislike?

3. What are some improvements you think I could make?

Any comment would be appreciated.

2 comments:

  1. I can tell you what I like. I'll have to think more on the other questions. :)

    You write well. That goes a long way in my book. No matter how interesting the subject matter might be, if you can't put a sentence together coherently, or string them together into paragraphs that make sense, you're not going to be read. So you're doing that right from the get-go.

    I've not read all of your posts because a good many are on topics that don't interest me (sorry ;), but the ones I have read, I've been impressed by your journalistic style of examining the issue from both sides, giving relatively equal treatment for both sides. Too many blogs, I believe, are all about espousing a certain opinion; telling the reader what to think instead of giving them something to think about. While you do have an opinion, and you do make it clear, you do NOT make the mistake of portraying those who disagree with you as idiots or madmen. Or at least not in the ones I've read. ;)

    You have a varied subject list. A perusal of your labels in the right pane of this blog shows that. You've got abortion, alien invasion, animal rights, animation, book and movie reviews, politics, local events, national news items...it's all over the map. While that appeals more to my style, I wonder if it's a bit much for some people to handle? Most blogs tend to be about A Topic (tm).

    One of the most popular that I know about is Single Dad Laughing. He blogs every day, and makes sure that people can find him. He's on Facebook, Twitter, and probably every social media outlet there is. His topic is Being a Single Dad and the Trials, Tribulations, and Joys of that. People know what to expect when they go to his page. I think he made his reputation on being a funny guy writing about his son, Noah, and only later did he start salting some serious, non-Noah topics into the blog. I've only read him for a short time, but that's how I'm guessing he went.

    Several authors I know have good blogs that get a lot of readership. Cherie Priest is perhaps the one that springs to mind the fastest because I was reading her blog before I read a single word of her fiction because she just writes that well. And rambles on about all kinds of topics, most of them about writing. It wasn't until after I had read her blog for most of a year that I finally got hold of a copy of her first book. I enjoyed it, but I think I actually prefer her blog.

    Anyway, that's what I like and a couple of observations. My blogs don't exactly get a huge readership, myself, so take any advice I have with a very sizable grain of salt. :)

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  2. Thanks for the comments.

    I think I'm going to keep things as they are simply because even if I were inclined to abandon the "World According to Quinn" concept and focus on one topic, I've got a whole year's worth of different topics already blogged about. It's not worth the amount of effort to go back.

    However, I am seriously considering going on Twitter. Maybe I won't accumulate 2 million followers in two days like a certain Charlie Sheen, but if my blog and Twitter feed "cross-pollinate," it could be a net gain for both.

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