The Qwertyrash Blogs

There’s a common suggestion in the blogosphere that you should blog your passion. I don’t fully subscribe to that theory for a number of reasons:

- Passions do wane
- Blogs do become like a job
- It takes more than just passion for a topic
- Blogging means writing.

If your passion is something you’ve been keen on for quite a long time, there’s a good chance you can blog about it for a while too. But if it’s a more recent “passion”, you might need other motivations to keep you going when blogging gets tough. Because they can.

What I think matters most is to be passionate about blogging. Challenges will come:

- traffic. Too much can cause server issues, too little can cause motivation issues.
- promotion. Yep. It’s not all writing. You’ve got to get out there an promote your blog too.
- trolls and flamers. You will get people who will leave comments that incite aggro in both you and your readers.
- spam. There’s some good spam management out there, but enough still gets through to be annoying.
- hackers. Nothing is more depressing than having your site hacked. As you get more popular the risk is higher.
- maintenance. Just the whole general maintenance can be a chore. (Remember to do regular backups too)

Generally speaking, blogging is a two-legged beast. It’s writing and the things above, which we’ll lump under one heading of management. Writing itself can become a chore, and many bloggers encounter bloggers block, despite being passionate about their topic.

You need to be passionate about blogging itself, not just your topic. Blogging is a way of communicating via self-publiishing on the internet.

In fact, if you are passionate about blogging you will be able to successfully blog on any subject. Look at journalists. They have to write about a plethora of different things. It’s the passion for communication that drives them.

But of course, it will be easier to blog a subject you already know about and are interested in. It’ll just make it easier to know what you’re talking about.

So: One, pick a topic you are interested in; two be passionate about blogging.

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