I'm Just Sharing

There was a New York Times article from a little over a month ago called Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest, talking about how many people stop writing in their blogs because of different reasons. One lady dropped because she started to freak when people noticed her out in public; she lives in NYC. Another person dropped it because she didn’t get a lot of comments and was disappointed by that. Still another person dropped blogging because he thought he’d make a lot of money from it quickly, but didn’t.

Blogging is both easy and hard at the same time. It’s easy because all you have to do is write. It’s hard because what you have to consistently do is write.

There’s not much problem with writing for many people, per se. What the problem becomes if trying to think of what they want to say. It’s one of the problems with niche blogging, when a person has defined their niche so rigidly that they don’t know what to write about pretty soon because they feel they’ve covered it all. They might not have, but that’s how they might feel.

If they’re not a niche blogger, they may feel like, all of a sudden, blogging is a chore. Suddenly, it starts to feel like work to them. Well, if your intention was to make money, of course it’s work. If your intention was just to write, and you didn’t feel the passion just to write when you started, you made a mistake.

There were a couple of statistics in the article. Per Technorati, only 7.4 million out of 133 million blogs they track had been updated in the past 120 days, or less than 5%. Also, CEO Richard Jalichandra 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.”

Heck, I’m glad to see it’s that high. It means I still have a shot at breaking into the big time with this, or any of my other blogs.

Now, I’ll own up to having some of the same feelings with my business blog some years ago. I was on the verge of giving it up back in 2006. I was on the road a lot, it seemed like a lot of trouble for almost no return, and then my ISP had lost all my content in a total system crash. I had a perfect reason to give up the ghost and move on with my life. Instead, I decided I still had lots to say, and would dedicate my time to making sure I kept writing updates. I guess I felt I still needed a place to say certain things, an outlet to vent, mainly about topics relating to my business. But it’s amazing how one can turn a post about almost anything into something that can be related to business.

See, inspiration really is everywhere and anywhere. Just as I found my inspiration for this post in the NY Times article, anyone can find inspiration in things they read, see, or experience. And if you have any passion whatsoever, you will, and you’ll continue blogging. And it won’t matter how often you blog, or how many posts you have. It will to potential readers, though, because if you don’t post often enough, people won’t come back. So, you also have to decide how much you care about that.

In the end, it’s not about money (though we want it), and it’s not about comments (though we crave them); it’s about self expression and knowledge. How much do you love blogging? And how will you express yourself today?