Guest Post: Blogging Tip – Don’t Apologize So Much!

You’ve started a blog, become popular, and now have a healthy readership and a consistent blogging schedule. You regularly blog two or three times a day, and people can rely on your posts publishing like clockwork at different intervals. You do everything right in terms of being a perfect blogger. So what happens when you don’t follow the mold that you’ve so carefully set for yourself? Do you apologize? Or do you just move on? Here are blogging situations you don’t need to apologize for:

1.      You missed a normal post. So what? By apologizing for not writing you’re exclaiming that living your real life is less important than getting in a blog post and that your readers have nothing better to do than sit around and wait for you to publish all day. In all reality it’s unlikely that the majority of your readers even noticed one missed post because it’s likely that they read plenty of other blogs as well and don’t obsessively keep tabs on any of them.

2.      Your post has no pictures this time around. Bloggers who normally have tons of pictures interspersed throughout their posts have a bad habit of starting off pictureless posts with “I’m sorry there are no pictures in this post…” or some variation of that. By doing this you’ve immediately negated the quality of your writing and the value of what you have to say. Unless you’re a photography blog, having a few posts without pictures isn’t going to kill your blog.

3.      Writing about your opinion. Your blog is your personal forum, and if voicing your opinion about something offends someone else then that’s OK. Don’t apologize for blogging about the things that matter to you – just do so in a tactful way. The only time you should ever apologize for posting your opinion is if you did so in a way that was in poor taste and was blatantly disrespectful.

4.      Being passionate about something. Maybe you’ve decided to write a series of posts on a particular topic which you’re passionate about, or you’ve posted a lot of pictures of your dog, or you’re talking up a storm about running. Instead of telling your readers you’re sorry for writing on one topic so much, just own it! Your passions are worth celebrating, and if someone doesn’t like that then let them go elsewhere. There are plenty of people out there that will appreciate it.

Over-apologizing isn’t just something that bloggers do; it’s something that people do in everyday life all the time. We apologize for everything. Spend less time apologizing and more time blogging the way you want to blog. You’ll find your blog is much more successful when you embrace who you are then when you try to conform to other people’s standards and apologize when you don’t.

Heather Smith is an ex-nanny. Passionate about thought leadership and writing, Heather regularly contributes to various career, social media, public relations, branding, and parenting blogs/websites. She also provides value to finding a nanny by giving advice on site design as well as the features and functionality to provide more and more value to nannies and families across theU.S. andCanada. She can be available at H.smith7295 [at] gmail.com.