Spice Up Your Blog

Are Good Question Askers Better at Blogging?

Posted: 23 May 2014 12:52 PM PDT

I could have also modified the title of this post and make it: 'Are bad question askers worse at blogging?'

Blogging is about creating value to your readers. You only create value if you are an expert at a subject. and share your knowhow with them. Of course this depends on the type of blog. A gossip blog creates value by posting news up to date.

If you ask yourself the right questions, you will get a better understanding of a given topic. You have more knowledge that you can transfer to others. When someone asks questions, he's interested. But this doesn't mean that you just have to ask as many questions as possible.

Think of people working in the office. Who is viewed as interested and smart? It's not really those who ask more often, it's those who just ask better. Just like at blogging Quality over Quantity is true. Good questions can be easily answered thoroughly while worse questions will have to be answered with phrases like it depends.

Questions with no depth

Spotting people who are not very skilled in a topic is easy. If their questions doesn't allow you to have a deep conversation, the case is clear.

Here is an example of bad set of questions in a conversation about blogging:

Oh yeah, traffic. How much traffic do we have? Answer: 10'000
How much money do we earn with AdSense? Answer: $100 / month
That's not a lot. How much is possible in future?

These are actually good starting questions. But hearing someone already asking how we can increase our revenue before digging in deeper into the data, shows he sucks at asking effective questions in this topic.

Questions giving depth

10'000 visits or visitors? Per month or per day? If the traffic was per month, the revenue per visit (RPV) was 1 Cent, which is quite high. That makes it unlikely to increase our revenue as getting more traffic is generally more difficult than increasing a low RPV. If the traffic was 10'000 per day, our RPV would be only 0.03 Cent ($100 / 300'000). The reason for this low RPV may be supoptimal ad placing or less targeted traffic.

That's what I call giving depth to a conversation.

Let's see what additional questions we could/must have asked:

How many Pages per Visit do we have?
How long does the average user stay on our site?
What's our bounce rate?
What Click-Through-Rate do we have for which keywords and ad placements?
What is the average CPC?
What is the impact when we put the AdSense box at place x?
Could we earn more money if we replaced them with affiliate links?

The list can be much longer. A good method for a blogger to find new ideas is asking himself questions that are as specific as possible.

When thinking about what to write next, consider this:

Start small with a general blog post.
After reading a part of your post, ask questions as if you were a reader.
Answer these questions in another blog post if the question is interesting enough.

Bam. You have a new blog post with depth :)

What is your experience as a blogger? How many questions do you ask yourself if you write a post? Do you consider yourself a good question asker?