When I asked readers for questions for my upcoming interviews with Professional bloggers – Bobby Masteria asked:
‘Ask long time probloggers what have been their fears, hopes and expectations.’
I previously answered the expectations part of this question – now I’ll turn to ‘fears’
Fears: I don’t really have too many extreme fears about my blogging. I’m trying to take the approach that everyday that I can earn a living from blogging is one day longer than what I ever thought I’d be able to achieve. Having said that there are a number of concerns that I have that have the potential to end or at least limit what I do….
1. To some extent I’m at the mercy of the Search Engines – particularly Google. Google’s December update left me with a third of the traffic that I was averaging which was a pretty confronting experience. It brought back to home for me how powerful an organization like Google is and how small individual bloggers are in the scheme of things. It also motivated me to find other ways of finding readers which will only make my blog stronger. I guess in the back of my mind is that the next update could similarly further decrease my position in Google’s results and could be a hit that I’m not sure I could absorb.
Of course yesterday saw the traffic (or most of it) return with another update from Google. I guess I’m learning that Blogging can be a bumpy ride.
2. Congestion of the Blogosphere (and the Web in general) – The past 6 months I’ve noticed many new blogs starting up with the express purpose of making a dollar from a niche topic. Competition is heating up as new bloggers and webmasters continue to enter the marketplace. I’m a firm believer that competition is good – it creates interest in your niche and it drives you to produce a better service – however in the back of my mind I wonder how many blogs and websites can be sustained on each niche topic? There are only 10 top 10 spots on Google for each search term so the more competition the smaller one’s chances of being seen there.
I’m sure there are other fears and concerns – I fear that my Adsense program could be taken away from me for reasons out of my control, I fear that the US dollar will continue to fall in comparison to the Aussie dollar and arode my earnings and I fear I’ll wake up one morning and my sites will have disappeared…. but in the scheme of things these are not things I worry about every waking moment of my day – they are just things in the back of my mind that I come back to in those quiet moments
What are your blogging fears?
