Blogging experience from initial excitement to tell the world your two cents to stark reality that you may be about the only one reading what you blog, save a few friends and relatives perhaps? I Know!
None of us are alone. The biggest culprit is lack of time and lack of compelling contents to turn heads. The competition for attention is intense, nobody says blogging is an easy way to get famous or make money.
Here is my question for people who while their time away doing nothing. Life become boring, time passes slowly. Why not blog just to push yourself to do something interesting, at least to yourself, to exercise your gray matter? This is not to say you have to personalize your every experience. Nobody Cares! Seriously most people only want to get the content and get out of your blog and move on. People Are That Busy! We are in such an Information Explosion Age you just can’t keep up with new knowledge arriving daily to distract you. Walk into any big bookstore eg Barnes & Nobles in the States you see endless new books being published. (Guess what? Many have their roots in blogs!) Who have time to read uninspiring blogs? So it is very challenging indeed to write stuff that can turn heads, anything under the sun! So with the universe as my canvas, off I go writing and writing and writing to keep me sane, occupied, clarify my thoughts, keep myself busy, vent my anger, frustrations and hopefully make money! Still at this stage, more that 90% stays in draft mode, I can wait.
So what do you get out of it? Nothing for the most part if you are looking to make money. It takes time, good luck and content of course. Making money can only happen if you look at it as a Campaign and write lots and lots of really useful blogs, by yourself or collaborate with others. It is not easy that’s for sure. You probably need a couple of years to reach critical mass. As for myself, I haven’t even get Adsensed yet one year into blogging! Why? Because Google flagged me down for too many draft mode stuff I dump into the dozen of blogs I have which is off limits of course to public, except this one. I can wait, very patient. Besides Google is not the only game in town. They must have met a very strange ‘animal’ (me!) with so much draft entries in the blogs I have. Actually 95% are copy and paste in a flash entries from news articles collected while googling, so the blog is my online dumping ground/database, not Google policy that’s for sure!
What to write? Seriously an average Joe like me just write anything to feed the search engine real stuff, not deliberately to game the system, (bad idea!) mostly life experiences, some geek stuff perhaps, but definitely I am not in this league, but this doesn’t mean I see myself as second class. So fellas, write with high self esteem! ( just be careful not to make obviously silly mistakes )
I had suspected blogging could be an impossible way to monetize meaningfully and the article below give crystal clear proof of the new reality. So remember it is a campaign to succeed, but if nothing material happen, never mind! You probably develop clarity of thoughts, a thicker skin, whoever comment negatively if you accept comments, you just ignore it if you choose. You never never know when all your efforts one day will come together into something useful when bundled with others effort. Life is strange! So I’ll keep on trucking (blogging), what about you? Please don’t give up if you see zero comments over and over and over! I love Zeros!
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html?hpw
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.
“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.” (I know that when I heard on the news a couple of years ago, now it is even more true!)
That’s a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized! This was the catnip that intoxicated Mrs. Nichols. “That was when people were starting to talk about blogs and how anyone could, if not get famous, get their opinions out there and get them read,” she recalled. “I just wanted to post something interesting and get people talking, but mostly it was just my sister commenting.” (stop boring me!)
Peter Yew said
I am with you and regretted publishing too many blogs thinking not so much of making money (it was a hopeful mission that I've since given up as I don't have the interesting contents nor skills to draw the traffic to my blogs let alone click on the ads). Even our family blog has become a 2-3 members audience I think you can't get everyone on your wavelength no matter how great it is. So will it just die after another year or two?
Blogging ought to be a practical mission. I started Enchanting Malaysia but cannot continue as I hardly travel now so I would be hypocritical to write on places I never go. I've closed one, probably close this EM too and end up just maintaining 3-4 active blogs. After awhile you just ask why spend so much time on a vainglory mission when time can be better spent elsewhere? Perhaps it is our online addiction, or we have all mutated into anti-social beings.
TonyPing said
We'll get somewhere Peter! All that is needed is critical mass of good articles, 50 at least and schedule blog publishing. Hard to accumulate them of course, but we do it at leisure and of course targeting a specific topic. That is the hard part, identifying a winner topic and also at least within our means to write something about it, average people with no specialty. This means avoiding deep stuff or we get laugh at. Look http://conjob101.blogspot.com/ for a very preliminary topic I want to write over the holiday travel, I just thought of it a week ago as a great topic to write on. I want to bring in contributors along the way, you are welcome to write on any of them. This is actually a sure bet topic to write on and will draw huge traffic. Basically it is mostly repacking of news and researched done by others on wikipedia and personal experiences, observations. The world is full of evil and this blog give much needed eye openers to many visitors before they get conned.
Peter Yew said
Can't enter conjob101 without authorization. Is that your blog?