Sometimes Success Lies in Moderation

Blond acrobat woman balancing on one hand.

*

Blogging Often vs Publishing Only the Best Content

For a while already I’ve been quite envious of blogs with a high posting frequency like

They manage to post daily or even more often and the bloggers are often whole teams. How can you cope?

Then it dawned on me that sometimes success lies in moderation. Brian Dean of Backlinko only publishes a post once a few weeks.

Sometimes it’s better to do less to succeed. It’s not just the quantity vs quality point. Moderation is about finding the perfect balance when doing things.

In business blogging and SEO 2.0 we tend to go for the most

  • traffic
  • social media engagement
  • subscribers
  • links.

Sometimes that’s too much though. Less is more when you focus.

When you have too many people competing for attention on a particular social media site you have to spend hours daily there to achieve some modest results. It’s too much effort. You have to try to do less of it to achieve your goals.


How to Keep your Twitter Stream Readable

A while ago for instance I decided that I don’t want to follow more than 1000 people on Twitter. I cleaned up my Twitter account. I removed people who rarely engage and automate a lot.

At the same time I didn’t want to unfollow hundreds or thousands of my followers like some famous social media influencers often do. I have followed these people for a reason in the first place.

I don’t want to follow only 100 people. It’s not that I think I’m so important.

It’s just that I can’t spend enough time with reading updates by my real friends when I get flooded by tweets from strangers. Thus I started reviewing the people I follow on Twitter on a daily basis.

Whenever I encountered someone in my stream where I didn’t remember who that is or what website s/he owns or writes for I considered unfollowing the person. I only followed as many people as I unfollowed to achieve balance.


Welcome Back True Engagement

Focusing on engagers worked. Lately I noticed that more often. I remember who the people are whom I follow on Twitter. I recognize the avatars and the people behind them.

Before, the number of clicks I got for links on Twitter was dwindling all the time. Now it depends again on the quality of the links.

Whenever I share something that is really of value for the people I get many to engage. I got the attention of my Twitter friends because they got mine. I was able to reconnect with many.

Of course I could go on adding examples for ages but I decided to make my writing both more concise and valuable in future.

The goal is less information more wisdom. I will try to achieve balance. Sometimes success lies in moderation. I want to make it happen more often.

*Creative Commons image “Balance” by Liber.

Merken