Debates in blogging circles have raged for years now on many topics.
- Should a blog have full feeds or partial feeds?
- Is a blog a blog if it doesn’t have comments?
- Frequency of Posting – Should a blog post once a week, once a day or 20 times a day?
- Should you self host your blog or use a free blogging platform?
There are many questions and issues that bloggers tend to debate when it comes to blogging and each time I ask one of these questions as a reader question it is amazing to see the diversity of opinions that bloggers have and decisions that they’ve made about how to run their blogs.
Here are some of the topics I’ve seen debated regularly over the years:
- RSS Feeds – Full vs Partial Feeds
- Comment Sections – Comments vs No Comments
- Post Frequency – Post More vs Post Less
- Domain Names – long vs short, hyphens vs non hypens, .com vs other extensions (like .net, .org), local vs global domain extensions
- Hosting – hosted vs self hosted
- Titles – descriptive vs keywords
- Content – Link content vs Original content
- Design – Professional Design vs Templates
- Ownership – Use Social Media vs Build Your own properties
- Topic – Niche vs Broad Topics
- Dating Posts – Dates on Posts vs Non Dated
- Anonymous blogging vs Using Your Name
- SEO – Writing for Search Engines vs Writing for Humans
- Personal Blogging – Sticking to Topic vs Injecting Personality and Personal details
I’m sure if we were to go through each topic in turn (and I intend to tackle each going forward into the next month) that there would be a little heat in some of the discussions because many of them are things that bloggers have quite strongly held opinions on.
However – the reality is that there are many ways to build a successful blog and in almost every debate that bloggers have there are bloggers who manage to take almost diametrically opposed approaches to blogging yet who build successful blogs.
For me it comes down to being willing to enter into building blogs that are shaped more by the topic you’re writing about, the audience you’re attempting to reach and in a way that fits with your style, personality and situation. Out of all that will emerge a way of blogging that is unique.
What other blog debates do you see happening?
