Brian Lee from Genius Types sent in the following reader ‘quick tip’.
Blog what you are passionate about. Even if your area of interest is not in Google’s top 100 searches, you will ultimately be more successful when you write from your heart.
A blog is the platform of choice for personal expression in the digital age. The further you get form expressing yourself, the harder it will be to generate excitement. People can sense when you are being insincere. Trust in yourself and write from within.
The beauty of the internet is that it allows people with similar interests (no matter how obscure) to find each other. If your passion is collecting guitar picks, blog about it! Your excitement will attract others and may even help some to discover your hobby.
Blogging gives you and I an opportunity that we may not have had otherwise: to interact with people every day about the things we are passionate about.
I completely agree with that. My blog is on World of Warcraft. At this point, I’m not all that interested in letting the game run my life like it has others, but one thing is for certain: blogging is pushing the playing and playing is pushing the blogging.
It is a great niche topic for me, but I have been struggling to find another that won’t take me away from my wife to get a blog topic.
You make a great point about people sensing when you are insincere with your topic. It can happen with a single off-topic post on my blog. They kind of think, “Wait, I thought this was a WoW blog.”
Having passion is not nearly as important as having (a) strength.
Just because you’re passionate doesn’t mean you’re proficient, nor will it ensure success.
Passion will not carry you thru the rough spots like strength will.
Passion will (easily) die, but strength will allow you to change your course, blog-wise, when you find that you’re off-target and that a small change in direction will bring in more readers, which makes you feel like blogging when the times are tough.
Everybody says blog about your passion … they’re wrong. Thats why we have so many dead blogs out there floating around, with no readers, no rhyme and no reason.
You don’t write all those blogs of yours because of passion … you do it for the money and the money came because you were strong enough and proficient enough to carry you thru all the changes you had to make to make yourself into a success.
I hope I never hear that worthless advice to ” blog about your passion ” ever again.
While I agree that you need strength to keep on, but it is the passion that brings you the strength. I may be very good at reading technical documents and proofing them for content and style, but I am not passionate about it. It does not bring me joy or make me happy on a bad day.
However, writing about a game that I enjoy brings me back to writing every day, and thus makes me a strong and prolific writer. My blog is surviving because of my passion to play the game and keep my readership.
I took a couple of months where I was playing but not blogging. That stunk. I enjoyed writing about it and sharing with readers what was going on. I had to get my strength back to write, even though I enjoyed playing it the entire time I was not blogging.
I am not sure how I have to take my situation. I definetly want to make money out of my blog, but I just do not want to write about something that I am not passionate about. I do not make a cent from my blog yet, but I just continue to write.
May be Mike, what you have said is true. It requires more than just passion to keep the blog going, and I think that is what I lack. I want to write about a handful of issues, and I for some stubborn reason keep them all in one place – my blog – and due to lack of coherence, I am loosing on something as a result of which I do not earn out of my blog.
But I have kept going, and it is still there. I am not a Pro Blogger – I do not post every day. But I do write every once in a while, making that post worth while. Call it passion or call it strenght – or lack of strenght – that is how my blog is going at the moment.
In my experience, I have found that “faking it ’till you make it” only works in the short run. Over time, passion is what fuels your energy. Although it doesn’t guarantee success, it gives you the best chance to succeed. Besides, how dull would life be if you weren’t excited about your work? In Blogging, we get the unique opportunity to choose our place in the world. Why not choose your passion?
In response to Mike, I have to say that passion is what life is all about. True passion runs deep and never really dies. It is a fire that burns deep within you.. It keeps you going through the “rough times.” True passion is what drives you. It enhances your life and makes your experiences that much more amazing. Just think about how much better your job would be if your are passionate about it, and blogging is just that: a job.
Passion brings you strength, determination, and, more importantly, purpose. To me, a blog without passion, is no blog at all. It is just a blogger sitting there, going through the zombie movements on a mundane life. Live in the moment, discover your passion, and blog about it. People will be drawn to you and want a piece of whatever fervor is deep within you.
For me, being truly passionate about something equals success. That is the stuff that makes this journey called life worth taking. Awesome blog Brian, of geniustypes.com!
it requires some innovations tough, and try to broaden your niche theme. let say if you’re blogging about “collecting guitar picks” you’re not going to tell how many guitar picks you have all the way.
you can tell story like: recommended places that selling guitar picks,other people’s collection, any unique story about it, some good photos or videos about guitar picks.. some advertisements from companies that selling guitar picks, eh?
I have only just started blogging recently (after setting up my blog in 2003 but never getting round to posting much!), so am late this is wossname
I have found i never had time as my passion took over my life, with my main shed based website, but now if i see something interesting out there quicker to blog it, and then it gets included on my main site automagically.
I’am glad that there are a lot of people who share my passion, and iam looking to reach them both with my blog and them reaching everyone by sharing their sheds.
But I’am still learning, i have yet to decide what is worthwhile to post and what is not! so bare with me.!
I have to agree with Brian. And, it has to be fun. Not that putting together a blog to post every day after day is fun, but overall, it’s got to be way you enjoy spending your time, and a subject you are interested in. Blogging takes up so much time, and who wants just another job that’s not fun?
But then, I’m not making any money at my blog yet. Just started out, really, but have met some nice like-minded people doing it.
Thanks for the post.
I think passion will get you through the tough times but you have to have more than just passion about a subject. You have to have passion about being a blogger. This means having passion about your subject, your writings about the subject, and building your blog about the subject. If you just have passion for the subject but not the blog, you’ll eventually quit writing and focus only on your hobby.
I’m with Mike.
I don’t know if many other people are like me, but my passions change with the wind. I’m a starter but not a finisher. I get fired up and excited and enthusiastic… but after a while – sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes I might survive a year or more, but eventually I lose that so called passion. But I suspect there are a lot of folks like me.
Passion will get you started.
But you’ve got to have something else to keep you going because passion can fade. Who hasn’t loved their new job but loathed it a couple of years later? Who hasn’t dumped a girl/guy who they had at an earlier stage been madly in love with? Who didn’t get the toy they always wanted as a kid (or a big kid) and then lost interest in it a few days, weeks, months later?
Passions don’t last, that’s why we have marketing guys to sell us new ones.
Call it strength as Mike did, or whatever, but for a lot of people, you need something more than passion to keep blogging about the same thing day in day out.
And sometimes writing about it every day can quickly kill your passion for something because it turns your hobby or passion into a job.
The dictionary doesn’t say anything about passions lasting.
Use passion to hit the ground running, but if you want longevity, choose a topic you’ve long had an interest in. A strength as Mike calls it.
Thanks to those of you who realize that there’s more to life and blogging than passion.
Without something – a system, a cheat sheet, whatever – to get you past the TV and in front of the computer, without that goal of posting everyday for 30 days, whether you wanted to or not, you’ll never make it past the 3 month mark.
Passion will wane, as it ALWAYS does, but by playing to your strengths, you can hold out til you can recapture it by changing directions, changing your theme/design or by signing a new sponsor who pays you per page views.
The next time someone tells you to look for a job you love … RUN, don’t walk, RUN the other way. Then go find a job that plays to your strengths. Strenghths will outlast passions every time. EVERY.
I believe Mike is wrong,
Passion is not secondary. That’s like saying Tiger Wood’s passion for golf was irelevant to his long career. That he would just be playing golf simply out of cold decisiveness, or to “make money”. That’s just nonsense.
It’s true that more than just passion is needed, but to say that passion is meaningless to success is like saying hunger is meaningless to eating. Whatever skills you need for blogging are sure better combined with something that you’re passionate about. Why waste them on something you’re Not passionate about? It’s going to be the same thing anyway, only in the latter case you’ll hate what you’re doing, which indeed may cause you to give up on it.
I don’t agree that passion will always wane. If it does wane, perhaps it wasn’t genuine passion, but if it’s genuine passion it stays for a lifetime. There’s a reason for why Mick Jaggers’s still rocking on stage at age 60+. They don’t do it simply because it’s “feasable” economically or whatever. Because if they did they wouldn’t have any fans left. But because they love what they do.
[…] Blog your Passion […]
I think more important than blogging your passion, you’ve got to be passioante about blogging.
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