Dose of Reality
September 16, 2007 by IrishSpacemonk
This probably happens to every anxious blogger that enters the blogosphere. You post obsessively for a month, watching your stats, hoping to see your authority on Technorati increase, or your page rank eventually happen on Google. You make friends, you comment on other blogs, you work 24/7.
And then sometimes nothing happens. Or a lot happens but not the sort of happening you hoped for. You start to question all your efforts but enough good happens to keep you going. You keep posting every day.
About the time you start to see success…you get really tired. So tired, that it takes more success the next day to keep your posts coming.
Do you give up? No, of course not. You’re still in denial. You still think it’s a maintainable system to pull off 80 hours weeks between your full-time day job and your full-time blog. (By the way, I truly believe creativity cannot happen in a tired mind.)
Then events happen that are never expected. Tipping points that make your realize you’re going to have to make a decision. You’re going to have to trust that people will still visit without posting every day. You have to trust that the foundation you’ve built will last.
Yes, this cartoonist is at that point.
PixelMarx was launched as a simple experiment: Draw one political cartoon every day until the election of 2008. The first cartoon took exactly 1 hour. The quality sucked. By the end of the week, the cartoon quality had increased dramatically, but each drawing now required 3 hours from start to post. And that didn’t include the time necessary to nurture the site, and grow its web presence.
30 days became a target date for evaluation. And 30 days passed with success. But the evaluation never happened. It was just easier to keep on drawing.
Then this blogger realized quality was better than quantity - after a few select cartoons really started to draw traffic. This happened last week, and ever since then I’ve been debating posting this third blogger bomb - The Dose of Reality.
For my regular readers - thank you. And keep checking back. Or better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed so you only visit when I have a new post. I do plan to keep posting, just not every day.
For those readers just visiting, take some time and explore. And a tip to any new blogger looking to start out…look for an idea that allows balance, and that’s maintainable. Post everyday for the first 30 days to establish your blog. But then have that evaluation period, and don’t keep posting just because. You need to rest.
At least that’s what the Doc’s told this IrishSpacemonk.
(5 votes, average: 3.8 out of 5)
Loading ...
I find this kind of sad. Because I started blogging at blogspot as a freshman in college, and before that at live and dead journal among friends, and also because none of this was an issue at that time, I was able to really enjoy blogging without all the madness.
When I started no one checked stats or anything. I never knew what a stat was until I moved to my own domain and someone asked to take over my old blog (for a nice donation to a charity I liked) and I found out the reason they wanted it was because of the page rank.
I can tell you that since starting to actively use my blog log and look around blog catalog I am amazed at the frantic desperateness of it all. I’m only glad I do not have to be part of it. It is much more enjoyable that way.
I agree Cooper. It is sad. Which is why I realized I had to reevaluate what I was doing and return to the real reason I started this whole blog in the first place - and that was express my frustration with the current political process, whether it be Republican, Democrat, or neither.
And so I’ve since removed Google AdSense from my page because I got tired of seeing McCain’s face show up, and I’ve decided to just have fun.
Because I work by day in the corporate world a focus on stats was just second nature. But I’m with you - I’m getting very tired of the same crap written over and over, post after post, just to get higher page rank.
And this last weekend, I was approached to write a paid review on my blog - I almost fell for it, but then they didn’t want to pay $50 and so luckily, I never had to feel dirty.
Never again.
It is very natural to first time bloggers of course to get obssesed with rankings and all. But that obssesion kind of ebb away as blogger days pass by.
I can totally identify with your thoughts on cartoon blogging. I’ve been slaving away since April 2006 at my blog, and it took a long time for me get over the obsession with getting noticed, and to get over the idea that blogging was an easy road to recognition and success.
I now have a small, but loyal core audience of readers, and reasonable hits for the archive content of my blog, and excellent search engine presence for certain topics, but it took a long time to get there.
I’ve made mistakes, and assumptions along the way, but it’s also been a great learning curve. Now I’m back to having fun with my blog. I don’t obsessively update every day, just for the sake of it. I have realised that for the majority of blogs out there, it isn’t about making money, it’s about having fun, showing people your work, and making connections with people all over the world.