Can You Go It Alone As A Blogger.

My instinct has always been to go it alone. But…

In the past I’ve done the whole blogging circle thing with commenting. I’ve joined various communities and invited people to join my tribe.

Yet I always felt uncomfortable with all those things. They never seemed meaningful or engaging enough.

I often read that you can’t succeed on your own as a blogger. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never tried before. Is that right though?

I followed the crowd and did what everyone else was doing. Over the past few months though I’ve been moving away from that.

BLOGGERS EVOLVE

First off I stopped commenting on blogs and removed CommentLuv.

On the whole, CommentLuv wasn’t going to get me quality engagement so I moved to Disqus. That left me out in the cold for a while.

Many things in the blogging world are about reciprocation and as I wasn’t doing that, the comments here dwindled.

But It felt like a breath of fresh air too. I concentrated on writing; both for this blog and freelancing.

I started commenting on a few blogs again after a while. I felt compelled to. I wanted to join in the conversation. No strings attached.

That’s what commenting should be about. Don’t you think?

THE SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL

Whilst Disqus brought with it better engagement, it also put some people off.

It sometimes wouldn’t load and people didn’t like to login to leave a comment so I removed it.

I went back to the native WordPress comments system. But I wanted more than that. I wanted to make engagement a priority.

Since Danny Brown started using Postmatic, I’d been thinking about using it on my blog too.

It allows people to comment via email. From the experience I’ve had so far, it brings back conversation to the comments section.

Moving to Postmatic concerned me because if I decided to go with it, I’d be consigning GetResponse to the bin.

When Danny reached out to me and asked me about giving Postmatic a try, it was just the push I needed.

I dived in head first and changed all my optin forms over to Postmatic. I’m looking forward to what the Postmatic team have in store for the future.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

My latest adventure in going it alone is to remove myself from Triberr. I’d become disgruntled with how it works.

One reason I decided to leave is because I didn’t feel that some people were reading posts before sharing them. Triberr has become a robotic Tweet generator.

That leads to an over-inflated Twitter share count which people haven’t really earned. I know many people won’t care about that.

They’re more than likely going to get traffic from it. Their Twitter share count may even impress their visitors.

But it was making it hard for me to quantify the worth of a share on social media. It felt fake.

The final decision came because I struggled to find content in my Triberr feed that I wanted to share. I’d caused that because of the tribes I’d joined.

Often I’d joined them based on their description only to find the content shared wasn’t what I’d anticipated.

GOING IT ALONE DOESN’T MEAN YOU’RE ALONE

One thing I’ve learnt from blogging is that following the crowd doesn’t get you anywhere.

You need to stand out, have your own voice and not be afraid to speak your mind. I’ve been described as plain-speaking and perhaps even a little bit scary at first.

You can guarantee, I’m not going to skirt around a subject. But that’s what makes life interesting.

Since I’ve left a lot of things behind, I’ve found many more like-minded people (and reconnected with some I already knew).

People who want to bring engagement and conversation back to blogging – not just comments for comments sake.

Now I’ve adopted Postmatic that will only continue and expand, I’m sure.

Joshua Wilner describes us as a “virtual UN of bloggers”. I like that a lot. It’s what a blogging community should aspire to be.

What do you think?