PaulNorwine.com

So I admit it. I suck as a blogger. To have a “successful” blog, there are just way too many rules that I don’t follow. Or worse, I spend too much time and effort stressing over rules that are, in fact, pretty irrelevant to what it is I want to accomplish with my blog. I know I’m not the only one and that most bloggers struggle with this same problem. But I’ve reached a breaking point. Blogging has stopped being fun and has become a J.O.B. that not only sucks but a J.O.B. that doesn’t even PAY!

So I have two options – adapt and change my approach to make it fun again or throw in the towel. Considering I have made a tremendous amount of progress in the three months that I have been doing this, I would hate to give up and lose the momentum that I’ve gained. But what is it that I’m actually shooting for here? I’ve spent the last few days re-evaluating why I am blogging in the first place…

Monetization – I’m certainly not blogging as a direct tool to generate income. Don’t get me wrong – there are some bloggers who make a lot of money blogging. It has become quite apparent, though, that the people who are able to successfully monetize their blogs (as in, income generation being their primary focus) live and breath their blog or have been at it so long that they have a bit of a head-start if you know what I mean.

They develop insane amounts of high-quality content on a consistent basis over a very long period of time and then spend the rest of their time immersed in a cycle of tweaking, testing, studying, learning, applying, promotion, etc. To be honest, I am not a point in my life where I have the time, discipline, or desire to do the things that are necessary to develop a highly monetized blog. I’m not saying I will not ever get there or that it wouldn’t be nice, but monetization is certainly not the top priority for me at this point.

Connection – Blogging was really fun for me in the beginning. A lot of it had to do with the novelty of having the first website that was entirely mine (I’ve had other sites that I’ve developed but were tied into past employment positions). But while that was fun, what was exciting was the CONNECTION aspect of it all. I started writing about some things that were on my mind and people started digging it. That was pretty cool. But what was even more exciting was getting introduced to other like-minded people and reading THEIR blogs. There were other individuals that not only took their own leaps of faith to go after what they wanted in life…but they also were giving me ideas on how I could take my “experiment” to an all new level. New opportunities and ideas seemed to open up to me and, more than anything, it was THAT aspect of blogging that completely appealed to me.

But somehow, I began to get caught up in becoming a “blogger.” I started to analyze stats incessantly and became a traffic whore. I began leaving comments on every blog that I could just to get traffic back. I stopped reading blogs that I actually liked and instead focused on blogs that could “help” me drive traffic. My content shifted from what was on my mind to trying to develop content that I thought would read or “spread” well. I started losing my own authenticity. I stopped getting involved with the conversations that I enjoyed and instead started promoting other blogs in the hopes that they would, in turn, promote me. Twitter stopped becoming a way to connect with others and became strictly a promotional tool.

And then I started stressing over post schedules, lengths of posts, keyword optimization, design, and all the other crap that goes into blogging. These things are obviously important if you want to get your name and your words out there…but I was becoming a slave to them and this is what was taking the fun out of it all. Plus, all of those efforts seemed to add very little to actually improving my readership and traffic. Most of my readers and traffic come from efforts and posts that I actually feel inspired to write. Go figure…

Listen, I know all of you who are reading this are probably saying, “dude, you’ve only been at this for three months. How can you possibly be burned out already?” Or maybe it’s, “suck it up, bro – if you want to blog, this is the shit you have to do.”

All I can say is that if “blogging” is always going to be like this than I will walk away now and not look back. It’s not worth it to me. I would rather spend my time actually living my life and making real connections with real people than being handcuffed to my computer fretting over stats, traffic, and reader counts. I would rather spend my energy developing new income streams than stressing over whether or not I can get two posts up by Thursday just because I somehow began to believe it was “necessary.”

So with that said, I am going to conduct a little experiment for the rest of this month. I am going to make this blogging thing fun again or scrap it all together. I am going to refocus on connecting rather than stressing over stats and traffic. To do this, I am going to break a few self-imposed “blogging” rules. Namely:

• No Post Schedule: I’ll post something when I have something to say. It may be once every two weeks or it may even be every day. I’m not going to stress about it. When I write or post a video, I want to be excited about it. Some of my posts may be short…some of them may be 3000 words. Who knows? I’m just not going to force content. We all have feed readers anyway so if you don’t want to read my stuff because I have a weird posting schedule, cool. No worries. But if you don’t mind sporadic posting times, than I’d love for you to stick with me.

• No Stats: I am not going to check my Google Analytics or Feedburner stats. I am also turning off my Alexa Sparky toolbar option. Obviously, forward progress requires some evaluation and tweaking of strategy but checking my stats every day isn’t going to change whether or not you read my stuff this month. Instead, I’m going to gauge my “success” for the month via my overall interaction and conversations with people. Worthwhile connections and exciting opportunities and ideas were what drew me to blogging in the first place so that’s where I am going to put my energy.

• Promotion: I am really thankful for everyone who supports and shares my material. Knowing that something I post resonates with people is a pretty cool feeling. And I love promoting your stuff if it strikes a chord with me. But there are just way too many GREAT blog posts for me to get around to all of them in a given week. We all lead busy lives – I’m trying to balance the development of multiple streams of income while at the same time still leading an active social life so I don’t want to feel obligated to read and promote EVERYTHING that comes across my reader and I certainly don’t expect you to do the same. Trust me, if I read something that I like, I will be the first one to promote the hell out of it. I just may not get to it and I hope everyone understands that.

Okay, enough of the rant. That’s it for now. I don’t mean to come off like this is such a big deal. Worst case scenario, I scrap the blog and keep on trucking without specifically documenting my progress. No biggie.

But I needed to get this off my chest for my own good. Like I said, I want blogging to be fun and exciting. I don’t want it to feel like a chore or a J.O.B. I want it to be exciting and I want it to continue to open doors to opportunities and other like-minded people…but I just can’t abide becoming a slave to it.

Paul

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