Blogging reality check

Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under Working for yourself |

I have been watching too much tv recently. It’s not that I think tv is bad, but if I am watching tv, I am not blogging. Or playing the piano, thinking up new business ideas or working out at the gym. Not doing much, in other words, that I consider life-enhancing for myself.

If I am watching more tv it means that I am tired, bored or procrastinating. I switch on the tv if I want to switch off my mind. This is fine on the odd occasion – we all need to switch off sometimes. But it’s too easy to make this a regular habit.

Nobody makes a new year’s resolution to watch more telly. We choose things that we think will make our lives better: get fit, eat more healthily, save money. Well, I don’t need to wait until the new year to make a resolution to blog more frequently, I can do that right now!

Blogging is not a chore for me, I really enjoy it. But it does take a bit of effort. It’s like doing some exercise: most people really enjoy it when they do it, but getting round to it takes some effort and commitment.

Blogging is a slow-burn process and it is easy to get discouraged. Most people don’t realise this when they first start blogging – I know I didn’t. I thought that if I built it, they would come! But unless you are one of the lucky (very) few, it takes a long time to build up an engaged readership that will eventually result in the kind of traffic, comments and ad revenue that encouraged you to blog in the first place.

I have been getting my head around that reality recently and trying to work out what it means. At first, I thought it meant that I should spend a lot less time blogging. After all, right now I’m not making any money from it. Perhaps I should be spending my precious waking hours generating income from another source?

But then I realised that if my blogs were ever going to contribute to my income, I would have to spend time on them, and make spending time on them a habit. It’s an investment of time and effort which will hopefully bear fruit in the future.

You have to believe that your blog content is interesting and valuable and that people will want to read it, if you are to stay motivated to continue. My gut instinct is that my two blogs do fit this bill and I want to spend time making them even better.

Who else has had the blogging wake up call?

Stumble it!

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