Battling the Blogging Blues

Here are some truths about blogging: it’s easy and, at the same time, it can be challenging.

It’s easy to set up a blog, many within minutes by using Blogger.com or Wordpress.com. This explains why thousands of blogs are created every minute of every day. If you’ve got a blogging itch, it’s easy to scratch.

It’s a snap to start writing – slap up a headline, pound out three to 10 paragraphs of insight, and then click “publish”

It’s easy to embrace a variety of tools to pimp your blog – widgets, counters, commenting system, RSS chicklets, as well as new themes.

And it’s easy to go through a honeymoon period with the ideas and blog posts are flowing.

But – and here’s the big but – blogging can be difficult.

It’s difficult to come up with insightful, creative blog posts day after day. A blog is like a dog, and it needs to be fed pretty much every day – whether it’s a can of Alpo, kitchen scraps or a high-end, low-fat concoction.

A blog calls you every day for new content, and doesn’t like it when the supply system breaks down because you’re uninspired, tired or busy doing something else. Even more challenging is blogs can, in theory, be more successful is you write more content given how search engines like fresh blog content.

It can be difficult to attract an audience. There’s millions of other blogs out there – 133 million to be exact, although only 7.4 million have been updated in the past 120 days, according to Technorati. Given the competitive, attracting attention to your posts is a huge challenge even if you put tremendous thought and effort into them. For months, my brother and I wrote a blog called “Four Reasons Why…” that, I thought, was a pretty insightful and funny look at reasons for all kinds of different things. Sadly, it was a failure traffic-wise so we moved on other things.

Truth be told, attracting a broad readership to a blog is like winning the lottery. You need to get lucky by picking the right topic, writing good posts, and do something to attract the spotlight – such as a link on a well-known person’s blog or a mainstream blog, or simply write about something different that captures the imagination such as Stuff White People Like.

It can be difficult to commit the time and effort to nurture a blog. It’s more than just dutifully writing blog posts every day; you’ve got to respond to comments, and engage with the community by leaving comments on other blogs, promoting your blog on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, Mixx, et al. You’ve got to be pimping your blog each and every opportunity. It’s an endless battle.

Blogs are a marathon, not a sprint. If you want to be successful, you’re got to play day in, day out to establish your place within the blogopshere. (Note: Success can be defined by how much advertising revenue generated, a higher personal brand, readership (number of readers or the number of engaged readers), new friends, and new opportunities that come along that you’d otherwise never get to see).

Personally – and I’m biased having blogged pretty much every day for five years – blogging is like having a second wife. It demands your attention, you have to treat it well, work your relationship, evolve to changes, and make time for each other. In the end, it may not make you rich but there lots of other great benefits for being committed.

More: The New York Times had an article in yesterday’s paper looking at how bloggers can lose their enthusiasm for all kinds of different reasons.

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