On a whim, I decided to go through all the blogs I follow. As it turns out, everyone and their mother has a blog and apparently I was diligently following them. The list mostly consisted of other wannabe-authors like me. Men and women toiling away, churning out blogs about their journeys, posting articles about writing and editing and just awesome life events and crap that is important to them.
Oh, wait, hold on.
While the blogs I followed were mostly other writers, they certainly weren't posting anything. This blew my mind. Not literally, just figuratively. Out of the 127 witty blogs with wonderful play-on-word titles, only thirty of them were still active. Most of them hadn't had posts in months and a lot years!
Now, I know how this works. Some of these blogs had been abandoned for new blogs, and I simply wasn't given the memo, but most of them were left out in the rain, much like that cake in that song. But, but, but, the abandoned blog owners will say. Everyone has reasons, right? Reason why they didn't write. Reasons why they didn't respond. Reasons, reasons, reasons. We are full of them.
Alright, I can sympathize. There are dry spells. When you're moving or birthing a child into this world, you can go months without posting but still have the intention of returning to your virtual stomping ground to deliver amazing content to the boys and girls following your blogs. You might be sitting there, baby on teat, thinking about all the things you want to say.
But those people are the exception, not the rule.
As I axed the inactive blogs out of my list of worthy reads, I picked out over seventy people who hadn't moved, gotten married, or pushed a child into this world. What is their excuse?
They are quitters.
Plain and simple.
Surely that's going to ruffle a few feathers. As it should. No one wants to be considered a quitter. But it doesn't matter how you cut it.
Quitting is for quitters. And if you have a blog you haven't posted on since last fall. You're a quitter. I don't care how good your intentions are. That baby is out there floating in the blog abyss, cold, hungry and wondering what it did to drive you away.
Don't you love it when I personify a blog? I do.
Some of these crappy blog owners might say they ran out of things to write about. I've heard it before. No really. I have.
If that's the case, perhaps the whole writing thing isn't for you. Because, let me tell you, even when my wells run a bit dry, there's still water seeping in through the cracks in the foundation. The soil is always moist, if you know what I mean. Granted, I completely understand if you don't. It was a weird analogy. I think the point is - you should always have something to say.
Simply put, people give up. Sure, I am only talking about blogs here, and maybe they don't seem important to you, but if you can't muster enough creativity or energy to post a blog once a week then how the heck are you going to stay on top of marketing your book or responding to your readers.
Think about it this way. All these people out there who start a blog, write a book, self publish, sell ten copies, don't achieve the staggering famedom they were anticipating and just throw the towel in. It kind of terrifies me to think of how saturated Amazon is with these types of cases.
But people don't read my blog, the quitters moan.
Boo-hoo!
Perhaps you're putting boring as dirt posts out into the world. Or maybe you aren't utilizing tags. There might even be a chance your really crappy at networking. Comments and views and reads ebb and flow depending on the time of day you post to what it is you're writing about. Word on the street is that twenty thousand people start a blog each day. (Those numbers seem a bit high these days, but as we know humans are extremely opinionated) With those numbers, it's hard to fathom making a splash in that sort of a pool, right? I get it. I understand.
But here is how I think about this whole writing into the blog abyss. It's practice.
Practice for when my seven figure deal comes rolling in. All I am doing is showing the world I have drive and tenacity. That I am not going anywhere. No matter how few of views on my vlog, reads on my blog, or likes I get on my sardonic but ingenious Facebook updates, I am sticking around. Because this is what I want to do. This is my passion.
I ain't no quitter.
That said, I cannot guarantee the content posted here will
always blow your socks off. But it will most of the time. Blogging is work. Whoever told you otherwise was lying.
Oh, yeah, I've decided to delete blogs off my reading list if they go a month or longer without posting. It's a harsh rule, I know, but maybe this will motivate some people to actually start taking this social media, blogging, virtual crap seriously.
