It's hard to define success when it comes to a blog. Is there such a thing? There are those blogs out there that are ad free and proud of it, blogging only to share their worlds with the rest of us. Then there are those with sponsors, product giveways, affiliate coupons, google adsense ads, and amazon associates store pages. I read both. For me, it's more about the content than the commercial, but I do enjoy a nice giveaway or links to products. I always try to tell myself that I blog for myself. But I can't seem to get over the fact that I'm not outright-amazing-quit-my-job successful with this whole blogging thing. I pour through my reader and find all these blogs with a thousand+ followers, sponsors, and freelance opportunities and wonder what magic formula I'm missing. My super computer brother Eric once said that if I could blog for a year, I would start to see some growth. Well it's been about a year and I have seen some. My radius has expanded outside of my family members and now includes some email subscribers and some who subscribe to the RSS feed. But, I still find myself checking my monetize tab daily in hopes of seeing a small jump in page impressions. Last Sunday, I hopped on to work on a post and found a nice new tab in my dashboard titled "stats" I combed through it excited to see that I had visits from all around the world and a whopping 800 page impressions a month. Energized, I decided to contact some friends with small businesses and ask if they would be interested in some free advertising as "sponsors" on my blog, excitedly sharing my magic number. So the next day I check my blog per my usual routine and the stats tab is gone. It felt like I dreamed the whole thing, like some delusions of grandeur. I hurriedly scoured the blogger help topics and nothing seemed to explain the appearance of this optimistic tab or it's subsequent disappearance. I did find a sentence somewhere stating the words "blogger stats" and "google analytics", so I signed up pasted the code and waited, eager to see the encouraging stats. I'm still waiting...
To me, my blog is similar in content to many of the blogs I follow. It may not be topic specific but it is narrowed down to a smattering of topics that appeal to myself and I imagine, other women. I played around with different designs and fonts but I kept coming back to the basic blogger "minima" with a few (painstaking) tweaks such as a three column layout. I want it to be classic and simple, how I've always seen myself. I tweet my posts on Twitter, I post them in my facebook status, I use all the feedburner tools I can find, and still, mediocre success. For someone who has had relatively immediate success throughout life with good grades, award winning sports teams and success in the workforce, this is hard.
Much harder than I thought.
