Remarkablogger

Why do people blog? For the same reason they send in that Publisher’s Clearing House coupon, or buy that video from late night television about how to spend your day at the pool, or call the diet come-ons: people believe that they can be the one that strikes it rich, easily.

It’s a belief that’s ingrained in all of us - the state lotteries count on it (and are never disappointed.) Blogging isn’t any different.

What have we heard about blogging? That it makes the common person an equal to the New York Times. That it can make you millions. Everyone from Google to your corner blog consultants (present company excluded, of course) have fed this fantasy - to their profit and bloggers’ detriment.

We see the outcome of this with the number of ‘dead’ blogs that are started and quickly go dark, after people learn that it just isn’t that easy.

Such posts as yours serve a public service. Yes, blogging is fun and sometimes profitable, but they take work. More work than you’re likely to invest.

It’s time to bring reality back to blogging. Blogging essentially is entertainment - like collecting baseball cards. Sure, someone is gonna find a Babe Ruth or Honus Wagner, but that’ll likely be saved for another late-night ‘get rich quick’ infomercial.

@Michael: The key to promoting blogging is emphasizing it as just another way to communicate. The internet is becoming a new medium, challenging TV and print. However, for that to continue and not blow up because of frustration, expectations need to be realistic.

We can help redefine blogging as a communications method by writing more about how blogging brings people together, rather than concentrating on how to bring more people to your blog, how to attract more readers — all presupposing the main benefit to blogging is making money — which isn’t true for 99.9 percent of ordinary, non-business blogs.

I wouldn’t get too hung up on the technical side of things, as many webhosts provide simple installers for Wordpress, MovableType and other blog software.
The really hard thing is writing content that people want to read and doing so regularly enough for people to hang around to read it

Michele

I’ve always maintained that blogging is simple (easy to understand), not easy (requiring no great labor or effort).

While you make good points with having to know some geek speak - I find that most bloggers, once going, will get to know the basics, if they don’t already. Even if they don’t, there are many decent consultants out there that help bloggers set up and optimize.

The biggest problem I find, is that people assume they can spend ten minutes daily, writing something up and hitting publish - and making it big; they don’t take the time to blog well ;), and that is why a lot fail

@Michael: Yes, the plain hard truth is that beyond the tech stuff, the seo and design magic, writing is at the heart of successful blogs. Once you get out all of your immediate concerns, most blogs dry up.

One positive from blogs is that they may encourage people to write more and become readers again. If that is accomplished, it will be worth more than the $7 in Adsense they earn all year.

As a new blogger with very few technical skills (but learning more every day) — I think what is easy about blogging is how accessible information is and how helpful fellow bloggers are. I have yet to come up against an insurmountable obstacle, even though my learning curve is still very steep. Which is one of the reasons I, too, love blogging — community!

And I agree — blogging successfully requires persistence and passion (and work!)

I started blogging last November. So, I still count myself a novice blogger although my blog is really successful. I use a self-hosted WordPress platform and
It’s been VERY steep learning curve. Still is. There is so much to learn.

It’s rather like playing Snakes and Ladder. This is how it goes (once I’ve written the post):

I find an image and start to resize it. (Oops - filesize is too big…Start again). I try and get the photographer’s name to credit (Oops - I downloaded the image from flickr but forgot to save it to my Flickr Favourites. Now…which one of the 22,000 images with a tag called ‘thanks’ was it??)

I want to place a second image further down the post. Now…let’s have a look at Skellie’s instruction on how to put a border around it…It’s just a few little changes to the CSS stylesheet…shouldn’t be a problem.

Five minutes later I’m just about ready to call the local police because I’ve lost my website and can’t find it anywhere.

Finally someone speaks the truth. I’ve been blogging with WordPress (hosted) and it’s beyond easy. I’ve purchased in the last month over $300.00 in book dealing with CSS/HTML/PHP.

It is work.

hola

i agree, blogging is not as easy as some puts it out to be. i started blogging back in 2001. i’ve stopped and restarted a number of times now.

for me, the hardest part of blogging is to churn out regular blog posts. which is probably the main reason i stopped blogging for a while.

i’ve just recently restarted blogging. this time around, however, i’ve also started to read more about blogging from sites like yours, which i hope will be able to help and guide me to be a better blogger.

I’m at this point where I’m ready to give my blog up. I’m not making any income out of it - that I’d be using to buy a domain name. I’m not gaining any comments. I have little amount of subscribers. I think making a blog is the biggest waste I’ve made, just by signing-up to huge directory lists and search engines. I don’t have a page rank. My total adsenses income is 2 dollars. I followed every tips out there, but nothing seems to work. I’d be deleting my blog sooner or later.