Everyone always wonders what it takes to succeed as a blogger, but frankly there is no one key you can turn to make success happen. You have to hustle to get traffic, and if your goal is income, you have to use the right words to get the right people coming over and clicking all over the place. Succeeding at blogging is chaos.
Failure, on the other hand, is much easier to pinpoint. Blogging failure doesn’t come from inconsistent traffic or mediocre revenues. It doesn’t come from negative comments or no comments at all.
In my five years with one main blog and multiple side blogs, I have come to the conclusion that blogging failure can be boiled down to this:
You have failed as a blogger when the demand to produce content outweighs the drive to produce content.
Simple as that. Once you lose the love of it, the pleasure you get from creating something for a blog, you have failed, whether you have 100 or 100,000 readers. If you aren’t driven by it, if you can’t make yourself want to do it, you have failed as a blogger.
I’m not talking about a few days lapse, or a week off (I took the month of December off last year, and put in a guest blogger. Know what happened? I micromanaged the whole affair.). I’m talking about an utter disinterest in your subject matter that you just can’t shake. This doesn’t come from getting called names by your commenters, or by being faced with a significant drop in numbers. Heck, it doesn’t even come from being sued over a post.
When you fall out of love with your subject, or lose the will to write regularly, that’s where failure sets in.
So those of you who are wringing your hands over statistics and revenue, get over it! You’re doing just fine.
And for those who have failed as bloggers: Thanks for trying. It’s not for everyone.
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Statistics and revenues? What is that? LOL I blog for the cool new designs. Heh.
Yes, YOU do. A new design every six months, isn’t it?
That’s where I am right now. I’ve already changed the focus of my blogging and web writing, but I have lost my drive and my focus. I just am not interested in doing it anymore. I guess I thought I’d be further along at this point, but RL problems held me back, and I am just exhausted, worn out, and want to quit writing altogether.
Deborah, that’s a pity. Sometimes RL intervening is just temporary, and we need to be in the right headspace.
Good luck.
[...] WENDY’S WISDOM– How to fail as a blogger …. [...]
I dunno. I’d add a caveat to this. If you blog on multiple blogs, it isn’t necessarily a failure to realize you only have the time and energy to do so much. Or, if you stop one blog to create another with a different focus/subject, that isn’t necessarily a failure, either.
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