How would you know if your weblog isn’t as good or as valuable as it used to be? My observations will certainly help you. 😉

1. Your feedburner chicklet’s figure is going down. I used to have more than 200 subscribers on my feedburner chicklet, now it’s much less than that. Less subscribers could only mean less quality content — losing subscribers is one good sign of your weblog’s quality of content.
2. Sitemeter shows an alarming decreasing trend in visits and pageviews. Directly related to your feed subscriber count and search engine visibility is the size of incoming traffic. This weblog used to get close to a thousand visitors a day two years ago, but now just more than a quarter of that figure. Sad isn’t it?
3. You’re getting less comments. Getting less comments on every entry is reason enough to panic, but if your regular commenters haven’t been leaving comments as much they used to, you know you’re in real trouble.
4. Something’s broken and nobody bothered to tell you. A few months ago, frequent commenters suddenly couldn’t comment because of a problem with my template. It took days until someone actually told me about it.
5. You’re writing too much generic entries. If you’ve been playing second fiddle to every other blogger and echoing what they say, more sooner than later you’ll be losing readers. Rapidly. Unless you’re one of those one–of–a–kind exceptions. Another variant of this is the photos–without–text entries, which can be quite convenient. This can offend your regular readers if overdone, unless you were a photoblog in the first place.
6. You hardly recall what your last few entries were about. If you cannot remember what you wrote about in the past five or ten entries, perhaps you’re too detached from your blog and not writing as much. Unless you’ve been writing too much you no longer recall most of them, and in that case you’re surely drowning your readers with information overkill.
7. It took you three days to publish a simple list on blog decline. Or any entry for that matter. Blogging is about instantaneous sharing of information. Re-writing can help you produce concise copy, but there’s a fine line between rewriting and making your entries stale. Try this: write for the moment!

All these would really matter if you’re writing your blog for consumption or monetization. This weblog isn’t entirely for that, though most are.

If you see the signs above, your blog might be in trouble. In the next few entries we’ll try to take care of that. 😉