I'm as excited about my blog as I have ever been.  Readership is growing quickly, incoming links are up, Google searches have spiked, and I'm finding new ways to monetize that search traffic every day.  More important than any of that though, I am loving every minute of it.  My fun level, you might say, is at an all-time high.

Blog boredom

And yet, barely a month ago, I was close to giving it up.  I was tired of writing the posts I was writing, tired of feeling guilty every day that I didn't write a post, tired of my free time no longer being free.  I was writing what I thought people wanted to read, the types of posts that I knew got the most comments but were mostly devoid of anything fulfilling for me.  In short, blogging had become a job, and a poorly paid one at that.

Where had things gone south?  At what point had my blog turned into a drain on me rather than an opportunity to communicate and grow?

As the New Year was approaching, I happened to be doing a lot of thinking about goals, values, and how I choose to spend my (finite) amount of free time.  And the answer to the above questions came rather easily: Blogging had ceased to be fun when I started writing for other people instead of myself.  I aimed to post every day, even when I had nothing worth posting, simply because I thought that I should give people something to read every day.  But my heart wasn't in it, and the frequency of my posts tailed off.  I tended towards giveaways because it was fun to get lots of comments, even though those comments were essentially "traded" for the chance to win something.

I decided on New Years that this year I would live meaningfully, and do only those things that brought me fulfillment in some way.  Blogging didn't fit the criteria, so it had to either go or change.  I decided to change it, and if it didn't work, I'd quit it.

The simple shift that saved my blog

In a New Year's post, I announced to readers that things would be different.  I wrote that I would no longer post if I didn't have something good to post, that I wanted to become a better writer and contribute more through my blog.  I worried that readers would view this as a betrayal, but exactly the opposite occurred: They completely supported the changes.

I announced that I would give away my 2010 Foodbuzz revenue to the Humane Society, figuring it was a chance to do some good and that it might free me from worrying about getting pageviews.  And almost to the day, money started coming in via other avenues.  Pageviews actually increased, but at the same time, Foodbuzz income became but a small fraction of my blog's daily revenue.

Suddenly free from the obligation to post every day, I started coming up with great post ideas, without even trying.  Posts I wanted to write; in fact, posts I couldn't wait to write.  One post idea branched into others, and I now have a list of posts-in-the-works so exciting to me that I am back to almost daily posting!  And not because I feel the need, but because I feel the drive.

Just as I expected, my posts get fewer comments now.  But I'm fine with that: I've found that the more interesting a post is to me, the less universal the appeal.  A huge percentage of my traffic now comes from search engines (people are far more likely to search for what I write about now than for what I ate for breakfast) and I don't expect Googlers to leave much feedback.  But lots of them subscribe, and they sure do click my links!

Who are you blogging for?

It's such an obvious shift, but somehow it's so hard to notice the problem when you're in the thick of it.  If you aren't loving what you're doing, you're not going to do it well.  And with a sea of blogs from which to choose, readers will quickly sift through those that are missing that special something—the passion on the other end.  Write posts that you love, and your blog will love you back.