Blogging Tip of the Day: Vol. 29

Today's Tip: Ok now you are going to have to pretend that I have never said, not to worry about who is reading you, because your audience will show up sooner or later. The reason for this because you do have to set "some" expectations for yourself too. The hard part is "realistic expectations" that will motivate you to get better, while not making you lose faith in yourself. If you go way way back to when I first started blogging, I had no expectations, then I had over inflated expectations, then I lost interest, then I had no expectations again. That was an entire decade right there folks, but when I took a hiatus and came back again I had no expectations and expectations at the same time.

Here's what I mean with all of this. When I finally said to myself "Self? You need to start writing again," my brain replied that it was a waste of time. I decided that I needed to do it to clear out my head, and then devised the idea that it is a hobby, and that is what will keep me from going mental. Ok then, the problem then comes along that a couple of people threw a +1 on my post and then because I use Blogger, it stuck. That was a metric. To make a long story short I decided that I wanted to get at least three the next time, and so on. As you can see in the graphic above my "Health Whacko" usually draws in between 20 and 40 +1s pretty consistently, with that 99 sitting there. I have had more than a hundred a few times. I am shooting for over 40 but not questioning myself unless I get under 20.

That's realistic, it's not special. The question as to why I didn't use the Blogaholics Anonymous log for my picture above is simple. Those rankings are always a lot higher, and I set less stock on those because I post to groups whenever I do those and it will always inflate the number. Now I also do with the Health Whacko posts but not always, and I wanted to show the more scattered metric. Now whatever metric you choose to keep you going is up to your but as always, you are setting goals, not victories. Victories may come out of those goals, but if you start looking at it that way then you are more susceptible to dwelling on what you may consider to be defeats. Remember, as a hobby blogging is great, but as a job blogging could drive you to drink.