John Chow is holding a group writing project to share why bloggers who don’t post every day, well, don’t post every day. It’s tough enough to blog every other day, which is pretty much what I’ve committed to myself I would do; it’s quite a bit more difficult to blog every single day, which is what I’d like to do. There are a lot of reasons I don’t do it everyday, but they all boil down to one…
I can’t picture a solid return on my investment.
That’s right, I said return; some people may hate it, but the fact is, blogging on a daily, or even semi-daily basis is all about the Benjamins for me. Listen, writing accomplishes a lot for me; it’s theraputic and it helps me organize my thoughts and understanding of whatever subject I’m writing about on a given day. It’s also helped me to become a better communicator overall by increasing the speed at which I can express coherent thought; it’s not that I’ve had trouble communicating in the past, it’s that I’d like my communication skills to be top notch, not just pretty good, and blogging is helping me reach that goal. Last, but certainly not least, some readers have contacted me and let me know that they’ve found my blogs helpful; it’s a pleasure to be able to help people like I have, and it motivates me to blog a bit more, but it doesn’t quite put me over that hump.
In spite of all the benefits blogging provides me, they’re only enough to motivate me to blog once or twice a week, but not every day. So why do I want to blog every day? Why not just blog whenever I feel like it? Because I see a potential for blogging to become an additional revenue stream, a diversified source of income. I emphasized the word potential because it’s an unknown. When I get home from work and all I want to do is watch TV or surf the internet, it takes quite a bit of motivation to get me to sit down and blog for an hour or so. I work my butt off in other areas of my life, but they are all areas that I know I can succeed in. Blogging is still a question mark for me. Will I ever get enough traffic to create a descent revenue stream? I really have no idea. It’s that unknown that causes me to chose the television over the laptop when I’ve had a long day.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Johan Cyprich // Sep 5, 2007 at 1:30 am
You made some good points here. Daily blog posts are difficult to do when you have a full-time job. Most people who post everyday are self-employed so they can take the time to research and write an article. I don’t think that probloggers realize that it takes time to blog. When you are at work 8 hours a day (plus the 1-2 hour commute time), do you really want to spend another 1-2 hours writing a post for something that might not even make money?
2 John Crenshaw // Sep 5, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Exactly, and it’s not that I don’t have the time, I do. It’s a motivation factor. I was thinking about this post for the past several days and I think there’s just a bit of uncertainty that I haven’t overcome yet. It’s like succeeding in anything; you’ll always have doubt, but if you don’t push that out of your mind completely and adopt an attitude like, “I can’t possibly fail,” you run a much greater risk of failing – it’s like I went over in my post, The One Idea That Took 23 Years To Understand And Changed My Life Forever, you just have to put any doubt out of your mind. You need to make a decision that either I’m going to do this or I’m not, and if I decide I’m going to build a successful blog, I just need to put any doubt that it may not happen out of my mind. There’s really no point thinking about it. Otherwise, I just move on to something else.
3 John Crenshaw // Sep 5, 2007 at 6:49 pm
One thing I forgot to mention is the fact that the internet is swarming with absolute nonsense. The huge benefit of the internet is the access to such a wide variety of ideas, but that’s also the internet’s biggest problem…it’s hard to sort through all the bullshit and find the nuggets of knowledge buried amongst piles of trash.
That fact leaves a big question mark in the back of my mind, bigger than building a brick-and-mortar business. I’ve always got that question lingering, “Is it really possible to build a successful blog these days with hard work and skill, or is it just luck at this point because the market is so saturated?” But like I alluded to earlier, since I haven’t been able to find the answer to that question, I just need to forget it and make a choice; if I’m going to try to succeed, I just need to forget my worries completely and charge ahead. If not, then, well, time to move on to something else.
4 Millionster // Sep 24, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Part of blogging successfully is knowing how to be social online e.g. networking. imho..
5 Millionster // Sep 24, 2007 at 9:34 pm
for example, you can help motivate bloggers by developing friendships and linking to them in a blog roll and contributing to their posts in comments. they in turn do the same for you. in time your efforts will be reciprocated…
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