Baldur Bjarnason @ Studio Tentra titles his post: 33 Observations On The Year 2012. Terrific post. Here are a few of my favorite observations:
#1) Doing good work is its own reward, while sharing it leads to suffering. Most of the time nobody will notice, so it’s hard to see why anybody should bother.
#5) The vast majority of those I encountered were incredibly nice and friendly, even when we disagreed.
#6) I have almost no readers but some of my work is read a lot. The number of people that will read every post of mine is miniscule. Most of the traffic comes from retweets or links. I have more than a thousand followers on twitter, but of those only about ten will click on a link to a post of mine to read it…No matter how hard I work, the best I can hope for is to catch the attention of somebody more influential who will momentarily lend me some of their traffic.
#7) A few of my blog posts did catch people’s attention, which was interesting and gratifying.
#14) Praise is generally only handed out on disposable media, like Twitter, and rarely anywhere where it counts (like blogs, reviews, or other writing), unless you pay for it…A remarkable number of people will only say nice things to your face, in private, and never in public. The end result is that positive feedback is ephemeral while negative feedback gets preserved forever on angry blogs, comments and forums.
#18) There is absolutely no correlation between how much work you put into a post or a piece of writing and how much attention it gets.
I encourage you to hit this link and read his entire post.
Another Worthy Post for Bloggers:
- How to Be the Real You In Your Blog Writing (By Diana Kightlinger)
All I can say is…I’m glad all I do is post photos…most of the time. 🙂
And me too on “shares”. 🙂
Horribly true in many of those points.
Yes, insightful post.
That’s good. Makes me feel better about some posts!
Me too
There’s no doubt that writing/blogging for a living is a massive challenge right now, with so many worthwhile/competing voices jockeying for attention.
I blog to reflect, hone my writing skills, and hopefully provide a space for some thoughtful discussion.
If a post generates some traffic, great. If not, I don’t carve out the time or effort to really try and push my posts anywhere.
And thoughtful posts they are. Enjoyed your current post on “Are you the average of the Five People We Spend the Most Time With”
http://mindfulstew.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/are-we-the-average-of-five-people-we-spend-the-most-time-with/
Very insightful!
He was…
Blogging has changed since it first became something anyone could do. There are more bloggers and more readers and more chaos. The first point says most of what can be said – “Doing good work is its own reward, while sharing it leads to suffering. Most of the time nobody will notice, so it’s hard to see why anybody should bother.” I think the key to gaining a large following is consistency. IOW — blog a lot and have consistent quality. If you do that AND discuss thing people care about you will be read. One of my most popular posts is “Emerson and the Meaning of mushrooms.” I don’t know why except that people like t have the meaning of stuff explained even if its by an ignoramus like me. Of course the search engines are powerful. I used to get ~ 100 hits a day on my “Walking Across the Brooklyn Bridge” post because one of the photos was in the first line of the first page if you googled Brooklyn Bridge photo. This went on for years. Then people started using my photo without permission on sites like the Brooklyn Historical Society and the New York Observer. I tracked them down and got attribution on some. But now when you search you get my photo on the first line of the first page but its the Observer’s copy — with attribution — fine except the traffic doesn’t go to me anymore. So bloggers need consistency, quality and — marketing. Using search engines to snag traffic is one way to do it. But since when did writers want to bother with stuff like that?
Again, you have me thinking and smiling. Have a good weekend Frank