In an ongoing series on my blog called Blog Struggles, I will be sharing my thoughts, experiences, and advice on the challenges I’ve faced writing online for almost 15 years. So far, I’ve covered the struggles to find blog content and keeping track of your ideas and drafts for blog posts.
Before I ask you about what you consider the hardest part of the hard work of blogging, let’s look back at all the different blog struggles and challenges I’ve written about here on the Blog Herald.
I’ve asked you to answer what it really takes to blog and got you thinking about whether or not you are blogging about topics you should be blogging about. Together, we’ve asked ourselves what is sucking your blogging confidence away and looked at what we can do to reenergizing your blogging spirit, which begged the question of whether or not your self-worth was wrapped up in your blog. Many times I’ve asked you to clarify your blog’s description and purpose to help you stay motivated and on track with your blog and its content. I’ve asked you to consider how you make decisions about your blog content, if you are writing for your audience or for yourself, if you are listening to them, and are you writing to encourage readers to return, or doing things that kill the blog conversation, which can also cost you readers. I’ve also asked you to consider the power of a the link and comments to inspire you and your blog writing.
I’ve written about the hard decision to finally stop allowing splogs and scrapers to publish their trackback links on my blogs, as well as how to help you make the difficult, and sometimes boring, decisions about policies and legal actions on your blog like writing a blog disclaimer or not, considering blog comments etiquette and writing a comments policy. I’ve also asked you that in spite or our eagerness to increase comments on our blogs, are we becoming a little over-sensitive about blog comments? What about how we should apologize for our wrong doing on our blog, if and when we do mess up. We’ve also discussed learning about content theft and abusive readers and bloggers, and the art of negative blogging.
From a technical perspective, I’ve helped you discover more about using your web browser to become a better and more efficient blogger, and to consider if you are really writing to help readers find your blog, taking time to fix and clarify your post categories and tags, and considering your readers when you decide how often to publish your blog posts, preventing your blog from feed fatique. I’ve asked you to look to your own blog to clean up the clutter and consider what are the most important things you must have on your blog. Putting ads on your blog isn’t an easy task for many, so I’ve asked you to think about the advertising method that works best for your blog, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, and eliminating the time-wasting efforts.
Security is always a concern for bloggers, as I reminded everyone when I asked them to update or change the passwords on their blogs to ensure they are not easily broken or hackable.
Blogging is hard work as it isn’t just about your blog but the time spent with social media that may or may not bring additional traffic to your blog. Are you wasting your time or making your time investment in social media work for you?
In the end, how do you really score your blogging success and experience? Has it been worthwhile and profitable? Or does it continue to be a bit of a thankless pursuit and you feel like you are spinning your wheels and considering adding a forum or doing something drastic to jazz things up with awards or contests, or possibly selling your blog?
Clearly, there are a lot of challenges and hard work that goes into blogging, of which I’ve just scratched the surface.
I want to know from you what is the hardest aspect of blogging for you. What stresses you out? What challenges you every day when you approach your keyboard? What do you struggle with as you publish your blog’s content? What, for you, is the hardest part of blogging?
