…with all due apologies to Descartes, and every other blogger who thought they said it first. But of course, I really said it first. I think. And I offer the following as testimony:
This was the card I used back at BlogHer way back when that site was just a lively bunch of women bloggers. Before it became an industry. That was, oh, about 2006 or 7.
The idea was that ByJane the blog, which was, after all, my by-line (byJane, get it?) was my personal version of Life magazine: a bit of this and a bit of that, all linked together merely by the fact that it all came from my head. My credo, if you can’t read the small print, was this:
This was my attempt to avoid the conflict that Lucie brought up in her response to my post the other day:
Working with internet gurus [she wrote], it was drilled into me to pick a niche and strive to work in that context, yet I am finding I prefer to write about whats going on in my life. aka what’s bugging me at the moment.
The internet gurus do say you must have a niche. Better to have twenty blogs each devoted to a different topic than one blog that covers twenty topics, they insist. The idea is that you build a community of loyal readers who know they can come to your blog for that certain special something that they’re interested in. Don’t swerve from your niche because you’ll piss people off; just imagine their response if they come expecting food blogging and find you’re giving them political rants.
I’ve just never been able to follow the rules (in this or anything else in life!). The result is that I’m not as successful as a blogger as if I’d been obedient. But I am successful, in my own way and by my own reckoning.
The fact is that despite all the talk of metrics and stats, success in blogging is really totally subjective. Success is a function of whether or not you’ve met your goals, and there are a number of viable goals that bloggers have. Here’s just some: for self-expression, to communicate, to share knowledge, to teach a craft or skill, to sell a service, to sell merchandise, to hone your craft as a writer, to vent, to figure out what you think–should I go on?
You really need to know why you’re blogging–what your Purpose is–in order to even judge your success. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Report this year, 60% of the respondants say they blog as hobbyists. Of those, 72% judge their success by the mere fact that they’ve been able to speak their minds. Those are some pretty impressive numbers, don’t you think.
My reasons for blogging have everything to do with writing and teaching and self-expression. What are yours?
