Photo Credit: chefranden’s photos

Just as a top needs help to make it spin, a blog is similar. A top always stops, and falls over, after spinning out of control, will you?

Today’s Lesson

In the past few days, I have been visiting and reading a fair amount of blogs and comments. I sense many bloggers are becoming disillusioned with blogging.

This concerns me, as most of the blogs I’ve read, are quite good. Many have built strong foundations that should easily move them into the future.

I’m reminded that blogging is often started with gusto. We get our domain name, blogging platform, web host, and we’re off and running. We religiously publish posts , and the traffic starts to show up. Granted, the numbers aren’t huge, but we know we are being heard. Then we begin to get comments. That confirms it. We monetize our site, and a few coins roll in. We might even begin to get big headed, and believe we are on our way to becoming a problogger.

But then we decide what we have, isn’t enough.

We want more traffic, more comments and more coins…..and we want them NOW!

So, what do we do. We start gwtting desperate. Just like a woman or man desperate for a date, it is not a pretty sight.

As bloggers, we may frantically start searching online “how to drive traffic to my blog”. We read things like: use keywords, link out to popular sites, submit comments, be controversial, Stumble yourself, Digg your posts, pay for links, use Black Hat SEO techniques. We do it all.

The traffic, comments and coins come rolling in. We gain popularity and soon, everyone wants to be successful (?) like us. We’re happy.

Or are we?

We decide that’s still not enough, we want more. Again, desperation sets in. We repeat the process of finding more ways to drive traffic to our site. Blogging begins to consume us. We’re on what we believe is our road to riches, however, our relationships, health, and jobs are on a downward spiral.

For one split second, we stop.

It is then that we realize we have been untrue to ourselves.

We think back to those first days of blogging. The good old days when we truly enjoyed just writing, not really caring how many people read our posts, but hoping we could at least help one person. We got excited if we made a few cents from an ad. We genuinely treasured each and every comment and enjoyed leisurely conversations with our loyal visitors.

We realize we lost site of our original goal. We got caught up in wanting instant gratification.

We did what we said we would never do.

Now what?

Today’s Assignment

If you have been blogging for any length of time, do you find yourself wanting instant gratification?

Have you lost sight of why you originally decided to blog?

Is it time for you to STOP, and reevaluate your original blogging goals?

If you’re a new blogger, be forewarned, this could happen to you.