1,000 hits or more [all rights received]

I have no right to blog. In fact, there are many reasons why blogging is a particularly bad idea for me.

First of all, I’m a competitive soul so I obsess about the stats. There, the truth is out. I analyse (within myself, of course) what should be deemed an above average viewing per day, or per month. I still don’t know what the average stats are but I visited other blogs and saw 5,000 hits, 20,000 hits and even came across one that will probably hit a million views in the next few weeks. After 2 months of blogging, I started to panic. I didn’t have that many hits yet! ‘Oh, no, everyone hates my blog’, I heard myself thinking one day. But I suppose my disappointment at my seeming mediocre stats wasn’t enough to stop me from blogging.

Not getting hung up on the stats is hard!

It didn’t help that I was so sure I would run out of things to blog about after the first ten posts. This was my second worry. Between my business addiction and my family, I found limited resources to guide me on what people may find interesting. It complicated matters that I wanted to be me (hence, the Me-Brand was one of my first posts). I wanted to write about stuff I was interested in and disengage from the conflict between what is popular and what is honest and pure. I was relieved when many tips I came across encouraged honesty and the charm of being real. Still, every post I wrote felt like the very last drop of creativity in my bones. I believed I was real enough, honest, engaging and all that good stuff but I wondered: ‘Is there really a bottomless pit of ideas?’ This among other questions, kept me up at night.

Thirdly, I work in the oil and gas industry. Although, the industry is high-tech and risky, with hefty men drilling holes in the ground and putting stuff in them, the demographics is largely one of fairly low-tech folks who don’t warm up to technology as much as one would expect. In an industry where only an estimated 25% are on Facebook, 10% on Linked In and 1% are bloggers, I couldn’t help feeling like a square peg in a round hole. Am I the 1% that blogs? And if I am, who in the world is going to identify with me? To stop the avalanche of negative thoughts, I had to keep reminding myself (and still do) of why I started to blog in the first place:

Blogging is an opportunity to write about my passions. I’m passionate about my family, my friends, my job, God, love (yes, I believe in love AND love at first sight), business, the idea of being an entrepreneur, doing things properly, fashion, honesty, a fair and righteous world, and on and on. And I’m passionate about writing, which is something I’ve tried to ignore. So here I am still blogging after 3 months…with more than 1,000 hits I might add. It’s perhaps nothing in some worlds but more than I could have asked for in mine. I am always elated by that new reader that comments or likes any of my posts. In any event, I still want to get better at articulating my points and The Daily Post is a fantastic opportunity for frequent practice. But a word of caution is that I am committed to being real and writing about my passions and not anyone else’s. Hopefully, I will be charming along the way as I try to ignore all the strong reasons why I have no right to blog.

Related Articles

• Turning Your Passion into a Blog (bloggingtips.com)
• Why Zero Blog Comments? (And How To Fix It!) (shoutmeloud.com)