Tag Archives: why people blog

Blogging For The Right Reasons

In the video below you’ll find myself and the other members of the Hot Blog Tips Hangout crew discussing the topic title “Is Blogging Hard.” It turned out to be an interesting conversation because the responses received and given weren’t quite what anyone was expecting, and we had a lot of fun with it.

Donald Keene at home: Tokyo, 2002
Aurelio Asiain via Compfight

So, do you think blogging is hard? Based on the frequency of my posts lately one might conclude that I would say yes. Based on the number of blog posts I’ve written on this and other blogs some would think I’d say no. I’m not actually going to give my opinion on this post because I want to encourage you to watch the video (heck, I know someone will eventually watch it & break the news to everyone else lol).

What I will do is give 3 reasons why blogging is easy and three reasons why blogging is hard, and then I’ll sit back and wait to see how y’all respond to what I’ve had to say. And trust me, I could say way more, but this gets the conversation started.
 

Let’s start with the reasons why blogging is easy:
 

1. Anyone can do it. You don’t need a special degree. You don’t need fancy equipment. You don’t need a word processing program. Truthfully, if you want to only post videos to your blog or audio files you can, along with images, which means you don’t even have to write if you don’t want to.

2. It doesn’t have to cost you anything. There are lots of free blog forms out there that you can decide to hook up with and you’re good to go. I don’t like any of them I must admit but this isn’t about me.

3. You have no deadline or no schedule that’s mandatory to follow. You post whenever you want to post and that’s that.
 

Now, 3 reasons why it’s hard:
 

1. If you care what you’re writing about you want to get it right. This could mean editing time, time to find images, time to check your keywords, scheduling time, writing so many posts a week… lots of stress there.

2. Responding to comments. This must be hard for so many bloggers because more than half of the blogs I visit don’t show that the writers have taken any time to acknowledge the comments that people leave them. I’ve been thinking about creating a blog post that would continue to grow of blogs where the owners don’t respond to comments; then again, why bother since they probably don’t visit other blogs either?

3. Coming up with unique things to write about all the time. It can be hard for some people to think of something to write about for a week or two; think about how hard it could be to try to think of what to write about for six months, a year, two years or even 5 1/2 years as I’ve done with this blog (or 8 1/2 years as I’ve done with my business blog). At a certain point most people run out of regular ways to talk about whatever it is they know and may not have the knack for being creative enough to find new ways and new things to talk about.

There you are, six things to think about. I’m sure y’all will have more and I’d love to have you share your thoughts. In the meantime I offer the video below; trust me, it’s fun. 🙂