I think that most people who have read my writing would consider me to be a fairly nice guy.  The truth is that I AM pretty nice.  I don’t want to be mean to anybody.  However, I feel like being brutally honest for a minute.  After being around the blogosphere for about nine months now, I’ve met a great many bloggers, and I have to admit that most of their blogs have been way below average.  Now, I’m not saying that my blog is the greatest there is, but the reason that I consider so many of these blogs to be of low quality is so simple that it just blows my mind that people can make this mistake.

PASSION!

The simple fact is that so many bloggers lack passion in what they do.  I’ve already written about passion before back in January.  The idea behind what I wrote is that successful bloggers all have one thing in common: they are more concerned with providing value to their readers than they are with making money.  When you are mostly focused on making money with your blog, then you are most likely doomed to learn a harsh lesson.

The Money Doesn’t Come Easy

If all you want to do is to make money, then you’re better off using the hundreds and thousands of hours that you’ll be spending and going and getting a job or something.  All of the stories that you hear about people being able to quit their jobs and live off of their blogs are misleading.  Either A: They got lucky, B: They spent months and even years building their blog and their work FINALY paid off, or C: They’re lying.  The majority of blogs rarely ever break even, much less bring in a ton of visitors.

This is most likely why you’ll run across hundreds of blogs in your day to day life that have less and less frequent updates.  There’s a lot more dead or dying blogs out there than there are blogs with regularly updated content.  So why is that?  These bloggers usually got into blogging for the wrong reasons, and after receiving little to no instant gratification, they ended up having little incentive to keep plowing away at their craft.

Do It For The Right Reasons

If you’re a blogger because you think that you’ll be able to live off of your writing, or because you hope to be able to change people’s lifestyles, their eating habits or their religions like other bloggers have been able to do, then I seriously doubt that you’ll be around for too long.  I don’t say that to be rude, I just know that if those were my intentions, I would have given up within a few months, just like the countless other bloggers that I’ve seen come and go in the short time that I’ve been blogging.  In just nine months, I’ve seen so many people come and go, which is a shame because a lot of them were doing so well.  They, however, were probably in it for the wrong reasons and didn’t see the great things that they had accomplished.

The great things about blogging are like the simple pleasures in life.  For one thing, the blogosphere, despite the number of people in it, is unbelievably kind and accommodating.  There’s very little competition between bloggers, and most everyone is more than eager to help each other out and to offer constructive criticism.  Blogging can give you an opportunity to learn and grow wise very quickly by discussion various things with such a diverse group of people.  And by writing on a regular basis and having your writing critiqued, you can very quickly build up your writing skills and be able to transition into writing professionally, and write a book, or possibly get a job at a newspaper or something of that nature.

So Why Do Bloggers Go Through The Motions?

There’s a lot to be enjoyment to be had from blogging, but so many people just simply go through the motions and receive very little, if any, satisfaction from what they do.  These bloggers may read other blogs, but only so that they can regurgitate the same information on their own blog.  These bloggers may post regular updates, but they are often lifeless outings, most likely copied and pasted from another sources.  These bloggers may comment on other people’s blogs, but only so that they can get a link back to their own blog!

Add that to the fact that the successful bloggers are always the ones who put their passion into what they do.  No blogger every made it big by simply writing a bunch of paragraphs and hitting the publish button.  And let’s face it, blogging is simply too ambitious of a hobby and too time intensive to do if you aren’t enjoying it.

Blogging Eats Up Your Free Time

All of the time that you spend trying to build a successful blog is time that you could be spending playing video games, watching television, getting high, baking cupcakes, drawing, playing basketball, exercising, and well you get the idea.  Blogging will pull you away from your former life and will become a new life unto it’s own.  You will not be successful with your blog if it is something you only spend a few minutes a day doing.

I recently went through my bookmarks and deleted something like 15 blogs from my library due to them not being updated in at least several weeks.  My suspicion is that most of these people realized that they would rather be doing other things with their free time than blogging, and most likely didn’t realize just how much time blogging would occupy.  I don’t know how many blogs are abandoned every week, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the number is in the thousands.

You Must Stick Out!

Now truthfully, you didn’t start a blog so that you could be just like another blogger did you?  Hopefully, you didn’t.  Hopefully, you started a blog because you wanted to express yourself on the internet in the way that only YOU can do.  You have an unique perspective on things that nobody else in the world shares completely with you.  There’s no telling how many people you could touch with your viewpoints and opinions on things, so why do you want to mimic other bloggers?

Find a way to be different from everyone else.  Do your own thing.  Personally, I named my business Swollen Thumb Entertainment, because I want this business to stick out from the rest of the business world much like a swollen thumb sticks out from the rest of the hand.  I want to be different and unique.  Follow my example and go out and do things your way, in the way that only you can do!

Disclaimer

Now don’t think that I’m referring to any bloggers in particular when I write these things.  The bloggers I’m talking about probably won’t read these things for two reasons.  First of all, they usually don’t bother to read many other blogs in the first place, and secondly, I don’t usually comment on their blogs, so they probably don’t even know about this site.  So if you’re a blogger and you know me, then I’m not talking about you. 

However, I hope that this post was able to remind everyone that just like with everything else in life, blogging isn’t worth doing unless you’re putting your passion into it.  There’s already millions of blogs out there that just spit out words and information with little regard to passion, so don’t let yours become one of those blogs!  It’s time to have some passion for what you do!