For some reason though, she wasn’t in my Google Reader. Odd, considering I have about 120 writing and marketing blogs in there.

Anyhow, I’ve finally added Aliventures to my daily reading list. I’m liking it – she’s smart, makes sure to take time for herself, works to live and not the other way around, and seems to be a benevolent soul.

She’s got this great post up about motivation when times are good. How we can keep expanding without cramming our plates full for the sake of it:

If you’ve got an okay-but-static business, how about:

• Writing a book or ebook
• Producing a new product, or improving an existing one
• Getting featured in the press – or appearing on television
• Tithing 10% of your work time: donate your skills to a charity for free (for me, this means maintaining some websites and doing some writing for church groups)

Grab a bit of paper and brainstorm some ideas for your business or project. How can you take it forwards?

Add Ali to your daily reader via her RSS feed.

I also strongly recommend that writers who love to blog download Ali’s Staff Blogging Course. Make a living doing what you’re already addicted to!

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.

• General Questions
• Traffic
• Content
• Community
• Your Niche
• Design
• Monetization
• Technical

Really the questions he lists are just guidelines to get you started. The idea is to come up with more and more to cover every angle of your blog. This will help you plan something better for the New Year, by allowing you to make small changes that affect the overall look and performance of your blog.

Girl on the Write is still new-ish, but there are things I need to cover in all these areas to improve the success of it. Traffic needs to go up, and ads need to be more relevant to readership. And community needs to be built. Over at my political blog there is a strong community made up of regular readers and commenters. I am hoping to achieve the same thing here.

Readership is valuable, and not just from a dollars and cents perspective. I have met some fantastic people via my political blog, and I want the same kind of dedicated readership here at Girl on the Write.