The One Magic Rule to Blogging Success

A lot of different websites give a lot of different tips that you can follow in order to reach a level of success in blogging. There's the always common SEO techniques, social networks, guest bloggers, commenting on other blogs and the likes. However, none of these pieces of advice really capture the essence of a good idea that has turned sour.
Blogging is not about having the top spot on Google or about driving 500,000 people to your site each day. It's really a life lesson just like a lot of things. That's right, bloggging is a life lesson. And the life lesson is that you have to enjoy what you're doing.
The blog has been over-glamourized for about a half-decade now. It's been called everything from the thinking man's memo to the way to the future. Everybody basically has a blog and some passionate bloggers spend hours and hours on each of their ten blogs.
That number sums up to over 200 million weblogs worldwide. That's a lot. If each of these blogs had only 25 posts (a pretty conservative estimate), you'd have to sit on26,455,026 flights from New York to Los Angeles, reading non-stop, to be able to get through all these.
So attaining fame by this means isn't exactly the best path. And it sure as heck isn't the easiest. You're not getting very many visits to your blog before at least 3 years. It's not impossible to have fantastical post that would suddenly surge to the top of Google and give you 1 million hits on your first day, but it doesn't happen often. (And trust me, I've dreamed of this many times before.)
Sometimes you just unwillingly follow the "10 Tips for Immediate Blog Traffic" but find that even doing this takes time. You have to implement a lot of things, from meta tags to a Digg counter to even subscription by email. Then, you've gotta promote, which often takes away a lot of your life. You have to act as the annoying telemarketer always adding links into your email signatures and forum signatures and everything else. And you can't forget learning internet codes, which takes days and days and you still only know the basics. You have to design all the graphics, add little widgets. In fact, I even have a checklist of all the things I need to do to a blog before I make my first post.
And the posting is the hardest. Many sites tell you to have a regular "Tuesday Ramble" or "Noon Hour Laurel" or something of the sort. Trust me, it's not easy doing that. I've never even made an attempt because that's just too much of a commitment.

On the other hand, you can do all of this. It's not hard. In fact, it's easy. But there's one condition. You have to love to blog. You have to love to go after research and make up exciting leads and struggle through the first few years. You have to love to see the results of all your codework and listen to criticism and delete spammy comments. Customizing and creating labels and titles have to be your things.
It's not something just anybody can stay with until the end. But if you keep doing all this, for three years. I guarantee you that you will have a successful blog. Blogging isn't rocket science, it's just a grueling process. It's not like inventing a new gadget or writing a poem. Blogging is about passion, not intelligence or literary skills.
I'll admit, you're only 1 of about 10 visitors I get every day. But maybe this will be my magic post. Never say never.

Why Blogging and Everything About the Blogosphere Sucks

Back in 2003, which now seems like centuries ago, blogs were a new and very innovative idea. The blogosphere was fresh and untainted, and everyone loved this absurd but cool idea. However, shiny became dull and now blogging is in trend but that's pretty much what defeats the purpose. The glory days have faded.
One main reason is that back in the day, if you wrote an interesting blog post, your page would be sure to surge to some of the top rankings in search engines and attract tons of traffic. But today, it's almost impossible for an amateur blogger who simply writes as a pastime to obtain a decent search engine ranking. Instead, the Wikipedias and CNNs of the world have taken over because they are considered "reliable sources". Sure, they have the facts but what happened to all the excitement to read cold, hard opinion and spirit. But if you are enthusiastic enough about blogging, you might try some stupid little tricks like search engine optimization, social networking and whatever the hell else but ordinary people don't have the time to do these things. They have to work, make a living and pay the bills.
On the other hand, big corporations and major "professional" blogs have the time, money and ability to do all these things. Now, smaller blogs don't have any chance of squeezing through the thick canopy of those Engadgets, Huffington Posts, Gizmodos and DailyKos, which by the way each have writers who are just plain writers. They don't have any jobs, so they don't know how real people feel. They're essentially robots. There's no more clever thought and hearty authenticism in the world of blogs; there's only the companies' paid arsenal of jounalistists.
And now, apparently they're re-making the rules of the blog: Zap all life out, write with apathy, don't write with emotion and don't you dare write as if you were directing each word at readers individually. Impersonal is the key to the kingdom now. Just look at all the lists of the top blogs; sure you might find the outlying personal blog, but then the other 98% are basically just online newspapers.
Plus, now you don't just have to compete with your fellow bloggers for readers but with other webbies who share videos on Youtube, share photos on Flickr and share personal information on Facebook.
So to try and do everything to get to that elusive 10-visitor per day mark, bloggers are now making an effort to be like the "professionals". Blog about the elections. Blog about Google. Blog about the stock market. It's all so overwhelming and irritating. The evil organization of writers is guiding the entire blogosphere into a bottomless pit of boring, boring crap.
So, this is all you get for spending many of your valuable hours pumping out posts? I could think of about a billion other things to do that are much more rewarding and satisfying.
All in all, people are asking a lot of you to show off your wit to compete with the likes of The New York Times, Time Magazine and Michelle Malkin. But I guess I'll stay in this garbage dump disguised as paradise ... for now.