5 stressful struggles of blogging

Since I began blogging a measly four months ago, I have found the five most stressful and annoying parts of blog writing. These are my top five:



1. Stealing all of my Time

Obviously blogging takes a little time. I might be over dramatic about it, but I wish I could log on and write a blog in a few minutes. However, I have to write html, find the correct links, edit the writing, and then once its done I still have all the work of promoting the post. I can be as prepared as possible, and still have a blog take me just under an hour to write.

2. Attracting readers

Some bloggers offer giveaways for those that sign up for their RSS feed. Some bloggers spend money advertising on the internet to draw in readers. And most bloggers have very few readers. These are the blog traffic tools that I use to attract readers. It is an ongoing fight to determine how much time to spend building readership and promoting a blog post, and how much time is enough and simply move on to the next blog post. Its a long process to build friends on digg, build networks on blogging sites like blog catalog, and get into the blogrush, entrecard systems. Building traffic could be a 40 hours a week job, its all about finding the tricks that are worth your time. It's finding those tricks that is the real struggle.

3. Content

I write three blogs (Blog Blog Cherry, Zombie Robot Frosting, and Bunny Art Blog) and content is harder for some blogs than others. I often find myself keeping notes, trying to keep myself with lists of blog post ideas just to make sure I dont end up staring at a blank screen fingers hovering silently over the keys with nothing but crickets in the background. My art blog is easy to find content, since I have 20 years of art to post, current airbrushing projects to show off, and a mass connection to great artists and neat ideas. 'Blog blog cherry' can at times be the easiest to write for, and at times the hardest. It is easy to find blog topics to write about, but its the hardest to find topics and the way to write about them so that people will read my blog as opposed to other similar blogs. It is very hard to stand out above the 50 million other blogs about blogging. Everyone and their grandma has a blog about blogging and its a damn struggle to stand out. Here is how I try.

4. Green Flow

Green flow or, 'money'. I never expected to get rich quick blogging, but you can read all of the ways I try to make a little money with my blogs. It is a constant struggling to determine what to put on my sidebar. How many sponsored links to have. How many different widgets, or advertising space to sell and where to sell it? These are all the frustrating things one must balance when trying to make a few dollars each month. See my $$$ stats

5. Avoiding Repetitiveness

One common reason I have a hard time finding blogs I enjoy reading is repetition. I do not like reading one post that is too similar to another post the same blogger had posted a week before, or six months earlier. I think this is similar to the content problem in a way, but I feel it is a much more diverse blog when it deals with a wide variety of ideas and ways to portray those ideas. It is easy to have minor success with a specific blog post, and want to repeat that pattern, until you kill it. I hate when blogs do that, yet when one blog post is more successful than others its easy to want to fall back into that buffer of sure success. But it will bore and turn away readers in the long run, or at least pour water your own creative blogging fire. I avoid repetitiveness by running completely original posts: Loose Change VS Google Adsense