Giving and Receiving On Your Blog – When Do You Start Receiving?

Alex — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:10:18 +0000

Usually I find that in blogging, more work is being done on our part than we will actually be rewarded for doing. Any time we do work, we expect something in return of greater value. And when we don’t get that reward, we aren’t happy about it all.

One of the many things blogging has taught me in the whole two years I have been doing it is that I will not get rewarded the way I want to be rewarded. I have brought that lesson into my own life outside of blogging, and I feel like it has made me a much better, and more productive worker. That lesson kind of separates the bloggers who won’t make it from the ones who will.

Hard Work Now Pays Off Eventually

It is not true when someone says that “hard work will pay off now” when it comes to blogging. Any success your blog finds is due to hard work. Creating your blog, constantly updating your blog, promoting it, it’s all hard work.

While it may not seem like posting your links on a few blogs every day is hard work, you have to look at how many times you have done it, and when you do – that’s a lot of work.

Expect to Give More Than You Receive

Just as I had opened this post, in blogging you can’t think for a second that you will get more in return for something you put a great deal of work into – especially if you’re new to blogging. I even have a great example to back that up.

This happened to all of us at one time or another…

It can take any blogger who wants to write a great article anywhere from 30 minutes, to maybe 2 hours (or more if it’s a really long post). On average, how long do you think it takes you to write a good post? For me, I’d say 30-60 minutes.

Our reward for writing a post on our blog are usually comments, right? Think about it, if you write a post and it takes you 60 minutes to do, and each comment you get on the post takes less than a minute to write – how great of a reward have you actually received?

You can be like most bloggers and take the fact that getting commented on is reward enough for writing this post, but if you’re an optimist like me then you will see the real value of comments. You write a post for an hour, and get a response that could have been written in a minute or less.

Does that open your eyes a little bit? Don’t you see that by looking at the little things like this in blogging, you want to be rewarded so much greater because of the time you spent making your blog great for your readers?

And At Any Instant – Your Hard Work Can Mean Nothing

With all of the things I have covered in this post, it seems like it is really a hit to your motivation and will to keep blogging.

Hopefully, you came into this article knowing that it takes a while for you to actually start gaining before you start receiving. If you’re a new blogger who may be unaware of this, then just take what I say here really seriously. Because it turns out that the people who don’t know this are the ones who quit on their blogs so early.

How To Erase All of Your Hard Work

Blogs require a constant stream of hard work to survive. That’s writing, promoting, maintaining, interacting, and building – which is a lot to handle.

If you did all of the above on your blog, then one would think that you are on your way to having a great, long living blog. But it’s not uncommon to just say “screw it” one day and not do what you’re supposed to do. So, with that being said: what makes all of the visitors and readers you’ve just spent time getting to go away? The exact opposite of hard work: doing nothing.

Going back to the idea of the rewards system of “giving more than you receive”, does it seem fair to you that you put hard work into your blog and then later decide to throw it all away? It’s a personal conflict honestly, and it’s something I’ve had to ask myself once or twice since running this blog.