Continue or Give Up Blogging - What I Learnt from Blogging

I hope this article finds you in good spirits. I had not planned about writing this in advance and at the time of writing it I found myself in a mixed flavor of emotions and reactions. Like many others I started blogging to make a place of my own in this huge gamut of blogs and started with a disappointing note but sailed through silently for quite sometime before I could realize what I am doing.

Most of us either start blogging on either personal or professional note. There are many things in common when you write on either fronts. Some noteworthy things about both the types of blogging are - topics you choose to write on, your writing style and passion for blogging. Many of us aim to make it very big by just blogging and some launch the blog and live happily thereafter by just blogging one or two articles a month.

I asked myself, what am I doing? What is that I am achieving out of blogging. It took quite some time before I found some answers from my within. A closer look at some points to measure my success were my sheer passion to write what I learn and share it with the world, write to become famous, make some money out of blogging to pay for my hosting charges and at utmost gain some satisfaction when people find my article useful in some or the other way.

Those were not the only achievable I could think of out of my blogging adventure. I also aimed to improve myself on numerous fronts. First, I wanted to learn to a great extent to provide accurate information for people to depend on. Second, I wanted to improve my writing style so that people will read my articles and come back to read more. I wanted to be heard, get some appreciation out of every one and it was a very tough task to engage my readers to comment on my articles. Nevertheless, I told myself that things take their own sweet time and I am far away from calling my blog a failure.

I found many concurring my thoughts when I spoke to friends and colleagues. Some other blogger friends were quite happy with few dollars making into their adsense account everyday while many others were doing whatever they could to improve their earnings. It was so obvious and I often found myself deviating my focus from writing good articles to optimizing my blog for search engines and adsense. Success seemed to be waiting the next street and every tweak I made to my blog was with the hope that the next thing I try will be the last change I will ever make. But it never worked that way. I found myself obsessed with tweaking my blog for something or the other almost every day. I lost my focus! I lost every bit of it.

I forgot the fact that my blog will be successful only when I add more quality articles in it. People will find my blog worth coming back to read more only when I write more. How could I let myself searching the Internet up and down, looking for endless number of tips to generate more revenue from blogging when that’s not what I started blogging for? This realization was good enough and I gave up the thought of short term gains and make quick money out of blogging.

As always, every plan can be re-planned and I had no exceptions to make. I sat down to re-prioritize what I wanted to achieve. I hope to find most of you agree with me on what I have come up with.

1. Quality and NOT Quantity - I will not write everyday, spend every moment thinking about what I will blog next. I will rather focus on my expertise and write articles related to the topics of my expertise. I don’t want to make everyone happy but then I should know whom I should please. I should know who are my target audience. I am into technology and don’t want to write something other than technology just because the whole world is searching on topics not related to my area of blogging.

2. Focus, Focus and Focus - I will never lose my focus again. I will write at least 5 quality articles every month and keep doing that. It does not matter if I don’t get 1 million page views a month. I will be more happy with 200 visitors every day who will find my blog interesting and come back to read more. I want handful visitors to get hooked to my blog and that’s how I will gradually grow my reader base.

3. Money is secondary - I don’t want to aim at making $1000 every month from AdSense and other similar programs. Rather I will devote some quality time writing great articles. I understand money comes when I have lot of people coming in to read my articles. I will gradually rise to the opportunity and only then I will think of getting an expert to do the ad optimization of site.

4. Improve and Improve every time - From every post that I make going forward, will look for things to improve. I will read every comment and try my best to respond to every one of those that I receive from my readers. I will take every feedback positively and improve myself. Improvisation is a continuous process, isn’t it?

5. It’s a long term thing - I have fully understood now that to make it big in blogging, it needs time and lot of quality content. I will continue to write with all passion I have and give my best to every article I write.

I am glad I made the realization at the right time. Those of you getting frustrated with blogging because you are not making money, please understand that you should never look for short term gains. Write and continue to do that and money will follow you with lot of great readers visiting your site everyday.

I am now in a long term engagement with blogging. How about you?

Please share your thoughts and experience about those bad moments when you wanted to give it up. Let everyone know how you overcame that moment and what did you plan to do, to achieve success.