Make Your Blog with Passion!

Make Your Blog with Passion?

That’s the secret ingredient!

Today’s post is a wee bit philosophical. Specifically, the philosophy of you and your blog.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s enough ideas about “how to do this with your blog” and “what to do with your blog” to keep you reading for a month.

But no one really talks about what to do when it’s just you staring at your blog staring at you.

And what about pouring out your guts day after day and only seeing…no comments! You need to make your blog with your inner self regardless of what comments say or don’t say. We’ll come back to this.

Is this the Community Judging Your Worth?

Not at all! But it is a trend that’s discouraging new bloggers joining the social community.

Did You Know: It’s not uncommon for popular blogs to have less than a 2 percent response in comments? Look at Social Media Today as evidence.

 So, if you have a hundred confirmed readers (for every post) that means two comments. If comments are the rule of popularity, then this “popular” blog is a dismal failure. But the simple truth here is that this just ain’t so.

What is a Reliable Measure of Popularity?

There is no one measure to gauge popularity of posts or websites. More likely you need to take several things into account such as page views, unique visitor count, and time on page. These are statistical indicators but there are other tell-tale signs.

Did You Know: According to B2C, it appears that many people are opting to use social media buttons in favor of commenting.

Who knew?! But if you think about it, it makes lots of sense. Using social media buttons is quicker than commenting, it’s one-to-many sharing (reader to network) as opposed to one-to-one sharing (reader to writer), and  its actually a quicker social bump to the blog as it’s immediately pushed out to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

Of course, one of the principal advantages of commenting is to “cross-pollinate” blogs to better strengthen the community and to generate back-links. This will suffer to some degree with the use of social media buttons. Still, if blog writers will also comment on other worthy blogs, this effect can be minimized.

So the Future of Feed-back is Social Media Buttons?

Lets call it the new “shiny” of social media. Perhaps its an evolutionary step in the progress of social communication. Its certainly an expeditious way to render praise on a worthy blog. It also does a much better job of conveying that sense of approval to a wider audience than a comment can.

The fact is we live in an ever growing society producing an ever growing amount of data. To deal with this increase of data we still have the same number of hours in a day. Our time and attention spans are taxed and fractured. We must husband our time more carefully and bestow it upon only the worthy.

Social media tools like social media buttons will continue to evolve so we can address more data with less effort and less time.

How Do You Make Your Blog a Success in this Reality?

That brings us back to passion.

I have told anyone who is languishing in blog hell: its not about the comments (or the social media buttons!) its about your message!

I’m kind of a die-hard Chris Brogan fan. In his book, Social Media 101, he is keen to point-out the virtue of people like me and you. Everyone is unique and everyone has worth. This unique worth needs to be your reason for blogging, your message.

If you started your blog with the intent to become “popular” or “make money fast,” chances are excellent you’ll see little of either.

Instead, make your blog uniquely you. Write about what you believe in. Go out into the community and find ways to apply who you are, what you know to other peoples needs. In Chris’ words (paraphrased) “…find ways to help and then help some more.”

Don’t let a lack of comments dissuade you from your message. Your worth and popularity will always be valued by your contribution to the needs of your social community, not by how many comments you have.

I’ll get off my soap-box now.