Five Things: Blogging Expectations

One of the truly worrisome (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Worry) aspects of blogging is having lofty expectations for your success as a blogger. Here are five expectations that could cause the casual blogger to become discouraged and quit the whole idea of blogging.

1. High Volume of Traffic: Every fledgling blogger thinks that they can start a blog and, like in that Kevin Costner (http://www NULL.imdb NULL.com/name/nm0000126/) film, the people will come flocking to read whatever the blogger feels like throwing out into the World Wide Web. If only that were true. This blog has a rather low readership, averaging around four hits per day since migrating to it’s current server. That does not mean there are never more than that, on occasion traffic will spike to as many as 60 hits. Realistically, the chances that a blog will go viral are about as good as hitting the lottery. Blogging for fame should not be goal of any blogger.
2. Earning Money from Blogging: We’ve seen all sorts of claims that there are ways of making money from your blog; the problem again is hitting that magical state where you have a popular blog that people will actually visit and feel like clicking on an advertisement banner (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Web_banner) or two are about as likely as hitting the lottery. Blogging purely to make money is a fiasco from the get go.Some experts suggest not monitizing you blog until you have a large following, others will tell you to begin using ads from the beginning. This blog does not make much from the advertisements (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Advertising) it displays. In fact, most of the ads you see are displayed gratis and mostly just links to things that the authors find interesting. Can you make money blogging?, yes. Will you make money blogging?, most likely no. You might want to read a previous post on this topic (http://feedproxy NULL.google NULL.com/~r/TwentySpark/~3/ZfC89FlL2kc/blogging-for-fun-and-not-for-profit NULL.html).
3. Repeat Visitors: Chances are that your blogging attempts will only garner a low audience, hardly ever will you have repeat visitors (if you disregard your friends and family coming by to see your blog). Until you gain more traffic, your blog will most likely fly well below the radar (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Radar) of most of the Blogosphere’s trending sites (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Website) such as digg, Technorati (http://technorati NULL.com/), etc. There are, however, exceptions to this, see next point.
4. Real Comments: About the only repeat visitors you will receive, this goes for popular and under the radar blogs (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Blog), are a horde of spam cementers. Finding comments to your blog posts that contain any real meat will be hard for quite some time. Unless you have a few points that no one has written before on a subject or have something to add to those ideas already out there, you will most likely get no comments at all on your blog. Unless your brother or best friend cruise by and want to add their three cents worth, that is. Just don’t sweat it, even the mightiest blogger has posts that barely get a whisper.
5. Referrals: Wouldn’t it be great to have links to your blog all over the Internet (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Internet)? Of course it would, that is why there are services that make it so you can generate links on other blogs and web sites to hopefully enhance your Search Engine (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Web_search_engine) Rank. A lot of these referral sites are either too complicated to work or do not provide an ethical way of generating traffic. If the referrals come, let them. Just don’t try and force them.

When it comes to blogging, just one word of advice. Blog for the pure enjoyment of blogging, don’t worry how popular your blog is. If you enjoy blogging, then keep at it. If you don’t, then bale out while you can.

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