Go with the flow

Recently I have talked about maintaining a style and keeping an 'audience' with consistency, but the truth is that sometimes a complete re-think is required. Although we should not be slaves to ranks and visitor figures, RSS feeds and the like, if something is blatantly not working, then the knife has to come out. If you decide to cut off the 'rotten fruit', then do so swiftly and with purpose. Personally I like to give a project every chance to succeed, but sometimes you have to just let go.

I have seen sites very successfully transform from a blog into a forum overnight. Of course, this does not really happen overnight and an awful lot of thought and planning went into the switch beforehand. When the change was made, the planning paid off as the forum looked already totally established because the webmaster had put so much planning into the project.

Once your decision has been made, act on it - start your planning for your new project immediately. Maintain the 'old' project until you are ready to switch to maintain what audience you have, promote like mad and when you are ready (My second rule of blogging is that you are never really ready...) make the switch and don't look back.