Calling All Readers: Help Direct the Future

Matt Ward — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:16:37 +0000

Hey guys. Today’s post is going to a little bit different from what you might typically expect to find here on the Echo Enduring Blog. I’ve been thinking about life and this blog and my freelancing career, and I’m just trying to get things more in order. I do pour a lot of time into this blog, and I would like to improve on a few things here. So, I’m throwing a few questions out to you, which I hope that many of you will answer in the comments.

What do you like about the blog?

It’s a pretty straightforward question. What are some of your favorite things about this blog and it’s content? I’m not necessarily looking for all kinds of praise here. I just want to know what you guys enjoy, and why you’ve become dedicated readers and followers of the Echo Enduring Blog.

Let me know what I'm doing right

With this information, I hope to be able to focus my content and vision a bit more, and really start to offer you more of what you want. I recognize that the topics of content can be somewhat broad. What I’m looking to do is get a bit more focused. If I have interesting ideas for articles that are a bit more off topic, well I have many alternate avenues for publishing that content on other prominent sites and blogs!

What do you not like about the blog?

Okay, I’m bracing myself for this one, because I know it will probably sting. Still, go ahead and let me know what you don’t like about the blog! Again, I’m looking more for information about the site’s content, and less about the actual design. We’re approaching the my one year anniversary in June and I’m aiming to have a completely new redesign up and running by then. Of course, if there’s something that you absolutely hate about the design (other than the white text on black background, which will be gone by June), go ahead and tell me that too.

Please, just be gentle!

Let me know what I'm doing wrong

By knowing what you guys don’t like in terms of content, style, post frequency (or whatever), I can work on improving in those areas, making a better reading experience for you and all future readers.

What is you favorite content?

My WordPress stats give me some indication of what some of the most popular posts of all time are, but that information is based entirely upon page hits and some of the highest ranked pages are the ones that have been picked up by some of the bigger players on twitter and other social media. Here are the top 10 articles according to my stats:

But what about you guys? Are these also some of your favorite articles or is there other content that you really enjoyed that just didn’t make it onto this list? Personally, I also like some of these lesser read articles:

13 Key Elements to Mastering Photoshop – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
Six Technologies that Changed My Life
Defend your Designs Against Unexpected Defaults
A Broader Understanding of Value
8 Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Start a Design Blog

The Fictional and Completely Made-Up Origin of Freelancing

What about you?

How do you feel about the Echoes posts?

For the past 30 weeks or so I’ve been doing a weekly post that includes one logo, one artwork, one tutorial and one website that I really like, and giving a bit of a review of these. I call these posts Echoes (as a not-so-clever play off of the name). I’ve received some positive feedback on these, but the posts generally don’t get huge traffic. Of course, I don’t really promote them as hard, since I don’t feel that these are the types of articles that appropriate to be featured on various social voting channels (which are already getting a bit clogged).

Should Echoes become monthly rather than weekly?

These posts do, however, take a good chunk of time to write. So, I am thinking of shifting these a little bit by changing it to a monthly occurrence. This would be a bit bigger and feature some of the best stuff that I’ve found over the course of the month. It will probably also be somewhat less structured, without necessarily including the same exact amount of different types of content.

What are your thoughts on this?

How do you feel about guest posts?

I am also hoping to get a few more guest posts going here on the Echo Enduring Blog. Every Saturday morning, I publish Brad Colbow’s The Brads comic, and last month I published an interesting guest article from Amber Weinberg, but I am still looking to have some more great guest authors on here from time to time.

Looking for guest posts

How do you guys feel about that? If I remain committed to still maintaining the highest quality posts (which I do) are you cool with having regular guest posts on the blog? I’m looking to eventually have one guest post a week, but let’s start small though. Maybe one per month?

If you’re interested in being a guest author here on the Echo Enduring blog, feel free to hit me up and we’ll chat.

How am I doing on the other stuff?

Finally, I would like to look beyond just the content and look at how I am doing in some of my other interactions. For instance, I am pretty active on Twitter and I hope that most of you are following me there. How am I doing? Is there anything else you would like to see in my tweets or are you pretty satisfied as a follower?

Some of the things that I am definitely wanting to get better at is to respond to more of your comments (I do read them all in detail, I promise). I’m also looking to get more active on my Facebook page (and I hope that you will too, letting us build up a meaningful conversation).

Is there anything else I could be doing, though? Are there any other ways that you would like to connect with me? Please let me know. I’m always looking to improve in these areas.

Well, those are all my questions for today. I hope you can take a few moments to answer some of these questions in the comments and provide me with some much needed feedback. Thanks! Looking forward to providing a better experience and having more contact with guys in the future!

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