The Way We Blog

It has been two good years of blogging. Ups and downs really.

You know the excitement when you first created your blog. You don’t even know what name to use: Real or an alias. Then you ponder deeply on the title, and think hard only to end up including “thoughts” in your blog name. Then you type your first ever post. Hello, world that is, or whatever your first post title is. Then you begin to explore the complexities of the blog design and settings. You smile when you get your first commenter. You reply with excitement and quickly follow your visitor’s link.

“You have a very nice blog. Thanks for visiting mine.” you say truthfully to your new friend. Then follows the exchanges of visits and comments. You do every effort to make a friendly comment, and at the same time put enough care in your every post.

Later on they ask for ex-links. “What is an ex-link? What is a blogroll?” you ask. Then your friends begin telling you what to do. You add a blogroll, a tagboard, and everything else your friends adorn in theirs.

It took you half a year before you realize that your blog design sucks. It is not actually, but you begin to envy others with beautiful blog templates. So you decide to change templates, and change templates again, till a smile returns to your face.

After a week or two of non-posting and non-hopping, you post an apology citing reasons here and there. Friends assure you that it’s fine. Then you realize that others don’t do an apology at all.

A year of happy blogging, you earn a page rank. But you don’t know what it is or how your friends know about it. Then someone mentions paids post and the PR. You check them out and even comment innocently on a sponsored entry.

A few months after your first paid post encounter from a friend’s site, they begin to flaunt their earnings. What dollars? Is it true that they earned a thousand bucks or more a month? Then you find out it’s pretty easy. So, you join the bandwagon and fill your blog with 30 to 40 posts a month, half of which earns at least $10 per post. Not bad, eh as you begin to see money flowing in your paypal account.

But at the downside, you begin to lose your usual commenters, and even readers. Deep down within you know you worked hard on every post, even incorporating your own experience that even without a sponsor you’d write them anyway sometime in the future. But there are times when you even loathe some of your own entries. So you can’t really blame them. Then now, Google takes away your prized PR, and along with it, the monetary opportunities.

I sit down and ponder. 2 years of ups and downs in blogging. The motivation is really not the money, the PR, or the approval of friends. I blog because I love to.