What are you doing?

What are you trying to do with your blog? What is your goal? Why are you blogging? If you are reading this post, the answer is most likely, "I'm trying to make some money." Fine. Me, too.

If you already had lots of money, would you still blog? I mean, do you LIKE to blog? Do you feel you have something to say? A huge percentage of bloggers today don't really have anything to say, you know. They have become like the newspaper columnist hack who has to crank out a column on deadline every week. What used to be fun has turned into work.

If you are blogging as a business, there are a lot of things you have to do that are really not that much fun. If you intend to earn money blogging, then the name of the game is high traffic. And people don't visit your site in large numbers simply because it is interesting and relevant and you write well. Sad, but true. If you are playing the PPC numbers game, many of your visitors won't bother to read your posts anyway. And if they bother to comment, it will be simply to grab a few "follows" to their own sites.

But that's cool. I don't write this in order to criticize what is going on, only to lament the demise of interesting blog posts, as a percentage of the whole. I understand and fully accept that if you are blogging for dollars today, that means you are blogging for advertising. You are a newspaper. A magazine. It is how money is made with a blog.

If you still love to write, for the sake of having something to say, how do you cope? You might do what I do. I have blogs for money and blogs for pure pleasure. You will find no ads on the latter, and no Technorati pings. It helps me keep my sanity. If you need to make some money, but you also still love to write, consider coming up with a fantasy pen name and open a separate blog just for the pure pleasure of it.