Five Things I Hate About Blogging

I love blogging. I really and sincerely do. Over the past few months, it’s become the great brass ring in my life. As I’ve developed be-something, this site and a few other projects I have in the works, I’ve come to realize just how appealing the life of a professional blogger is.

It’s like freelancing without ever having to deal with clients. The idea of passive income, where you make money when you sleep, eat or play Wii games, is something I desire more than any sort of high-paying office job. I don’t know what my goals would be without the internet, because my current reality is that I’d rather make less money as a blogger than have to work for someone else. My brain is just unable to process the idea of working for forty-plus years for eight hours a day in an office — so it’s awesome that blogging has given me hope for a way out.

All that said, though, the last three months in the blogging world has made me realize that, while I love the concepts behind blogging and being a problogger, there’s a lot about the blogging culture that drives me more than a little crazy. In fact, there are some things I outright hate.

I’ve decided to capitalize on these hates for my entry to Darren Rowse’s latest group writing project. (The instructions to which are here.) It’s my hope that the probloggers and other wannabe-pro bloggers will empathize with some of these annoyances.

Blogging may be a pretty awesome career choice, but it’s definitely far from perfect. So, just for today, let’s focus on the negatives.

5. Slow-loading Webhosts

I use dreamhost (aff) for all my sites, and while I’ve had my issues with them, I’m generally pretty happy with their service, especially considering the crazily low price I pay for their hosting.

What I’m not happy about at all is the random bouts of slowness. Slowness is to be expected every now and then with every webhost, but why does it always strike at times when you’re right in the middle of writing a big long blog post? Worse is when it happens right after you’ve posted your big long entry and then realize you’ve made a typo or coding error. There’s nothing like waiting five minutes for the wordpress admin panel to come up to fix the fact that you just made your whole sidebar italic.

It’s a hate because there’s not a lot you can do about it. Sometimes it’s not even your webhost’s fault. Sometimes it’s just an ISP or a connection issue. Sometimes your computer just decides it doesn’t want to respond to your requests. Whatever the case, it’s a powerless feeling, which is something you never want when you’re dealing with your business. Even if that business is blogging.

4. Stats Obsessions

I think all bloggers have been here. For the first couple of months after you set up your new blog, your stats page might as well contain nicotine. You’re constantly doing all you can to drive traffic — whether it be digging, stumbling or link trading — and after each move you want to see an immediate and noticeable effect.

And it can really drive your emotions. From happy to sad to hopeful to hopeless, a bad day can make you want to give up, while a good day can make you believe you’ll never have to wake up before 9 a.m. ever again.

In the end, I find this tends to fade, as you gain confidence in your online ventures and realize their potential, but, for a while, you’ll feel like you’re bound to those numbers and percentages.

3. The Mystical Nature of Advertising Programs

If you run Google Adsense on your new blog, it’ll definitely be one of those stats pages you’ll find yourself refreshing (and re-logging into, because of that darn time-out) constantly. And within that page you’ll find a whole other layer of annoyance. For as good as these advertising programs are at monetizing your content, there’s still a whole other layer of mystery on top of the pay-outs.

Adsense users know what I’m talking about. For one click, you’ll find yourself making 60 or 70 cents. For the next, it’ll be one cent. And there’s no way of ever finding out why that is. Hell, some days I’ve gotten clicks that were worth almost five dollars (I’m sure some of the bigger bloggers have gotten even more), only to make less than fifty sense the next day off a whole bunch of one-cent clicks.

I understand why google won’t reveal all the data behind their program, but it sure would be nice to understand a bit more about where the dollar value is coming from, especially as people are starting to rely on adsense as one of their principal income streams.

2. The Lack of Places to Really Market Yourself

The parts of the internet I’ve been marketing my sites to is generally made up of young American males. This isn’t surprising, really, as a gigantic part of the internet is made up of nothing but young American males. And, for the most part, they’re a good audience. They have a lot of free time, which leads to them spending a lot of time surfing social networking sites like digg or reddit and they’re often eager to leave comments and spark conversations.

Where they can be infuriating is in their resistance to marketing and marketing messages. Put simply, I find that this audience is entirely adverse to anything that they feel is out to make money. They’re even more adverse to anything that might be trying to sell them a product or make money directly off of them.

As a blogger, you’ve got to be really careful when pimping your own stuff, because otherwise you’ll quickly be labeled a self-promoter. Or, worse, a spammer.

It’s always a fine line.

1. Feeling Like a Sell-Out

And, on the other side of that line, there’s this. I think this is something a lot of bloggers struggle with. Generally we’re taught as kids that we need to be humble and not show overt pride in our own accomplishments. However, as a blogger you need to disregard all of that.

Instead, you need to reach right out and proclaim to the world that “my writing is good!” You have to not only believe that your own stuff is worth-reading, you have to go out and spread that message with the world. And that doesn’t mean you have to be all scammy or pompous about it, but it does require a certain bit of shamelessness.

That’s been perhaps the hardest part about this transition for me. It was nice to think that maybe I didn’t need to go out there and promote — that maybe my writing would attract readers on its own. But the reality is that even the best bloggers need to make themselves visible before anyone will ever give a damn. That shamelessness is part of the game.

And so…

That’s the top five. Of course, there are others. Some are major, and just barely missed this list, like the impossible tendency to want to continue tweaking or re-tweaking your site’s template. Others are minor, like the fact that John Chow keeps posting pictures of food. But despite all of these, none are enough to dampen my enthusiasm for blogging.