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1. Importance is based on earnings

   Many people think that the richer a blogger is, the more important that blogger is supposed to be. The next time you run into a blogger and want to act discriminatory, or simply want to stereotype them, simply find out how much money they make, and worship them accordingly.

   This stereotype is the reason why you see so many immature and manipulative bloggers running around claiming authority, when all they have is an authority on the amount of money they make. Have money? Will worship.

2. Intelligence of others is based on their topics of interest

   Because of this stereotype, most personal bloggers and personal blogs are not taken seriously by many in the blogosphere. Sure, talking about overcooking the tuna may be interesting to someone, but you think such bloggers need sympathy and mental help. For you, the only normal bloggers may be the ones who talk about ways to make money, or they talk about topics which make them money, enabling you to use the first point above into your judgment too.

   This stereotype is one of the reasons personal bloggers are considered to be less knowledgeable, and also less important, than many other kinds of bloggers. This very stereotype may also blind you from the fact that personal bloggers shaped the origins and the beginning of the blogging trend. Instead of feeling lucky that you know bloggers and personal bloggers who have defined history for all future bloggers for generations to come, you simply think “A blog about daily life? This blogger has no life!“

3. Disagreements mean there are enemies

   This is one of the classics. If you see a blogger talking about something which disagrees with what you believe either directly or indirectly, you use the offline stereotype regarding disagreements and immediately start considering that blogger to be your life-long enemy. A blogger says Honda is the best but you think Ford is superior? You pray for that blogger’s doom. They eat 3 times a day but you prefer eating 5 times a day? You start attacking them directly and personally for not living their life the way you want them to live their life.

   Everyone can have their own understanding of the world, but this offline stereotype, which even prompts many people to find mirror copies of themselves to date, results in people feeling that the existence of any difference of opinion means we have to learn the art of fist fighting and we have to convert everyone else, by force, to our way of thinking.

4. Intelligence is measured by appearance

   For many people, a poorly designed blog means the blogger in question is stupid. This has something to do with our offline lives; if you see two business people, wearing the same suit and both appearing professional arrive in two different vehicles, one being a brand new car, and the other being a rusty old truck from 1950 with loud, annoying music on, which person would you be more inclined to do business with? Many people, if not most, will be inclined to choose the guy in the new car. Why? Because we care about appearances. You may think bloggers are stupid unless the nice design of a blog makes you want to smell your monitor to see if you can smell the freshness.

   While caring for appearances is important, we forget the fact that sometimes some people cannot fix certain things, or do not know how to. However, this offline stereotype of judging others based on their appearance to think that anyone who does not have a good looking blog is not a good blogger, cannot think logically, cannot writer, cannot communicate, and so on. Is that not sort of similar to what we do in the offline world, where if we are right about someone being careless enough to not take care of their appearance when they possibly can, we start questioning unrelated things about their character also, like loyalty, intelligence, and importance?

5. Ethnicity, gender, political and religious affiliations define a person for you, and not what the person actually does in life

   This can be the classic example for many people. The same way many people categorize and judge others in the offline world based on ethnic background, gender, political and religious affiliations, I am noticing many people judge bloggers based on their similar characteristics. You hate people from certain ethnicities and you run into a blogger from that ethnicity? No problem; you simply stereotype and tell the blogger “How dare you go online and start blogging? People of your type should be banned from blogging.”

   Sure, a blogger may themselves try to promote their ethnicity, gender, political or religious affiliation onto the reader, but you do not need to follow their example. It is better to judge people based on how they relate and value certain things, like religion, than to associate them with a certain religion and treat them the same way you supposedly want to treat everyone from that specific trait or religion.

There you have it. Those are the 5 stereotypical things that I think many people have successfully brought from their offline lives onto the online world. If you want to continue stereotyping in the online world, the above list can serve as a cheat sheet for you to refer to whenever you want to think of solid, proven methods to stereotype bloggers.

What is your opinion about this? Can you think of some other points that allow many of us to categorize and stereotype against bloggers?

Thank you for reading.

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If you are a blogger, you may have a habit of responding only to certain comments or commentors, or you may try to respond to every comment. You may also not respond to any comment at all. If you are a blogger, you should realize that there is a difference between responding to comments and simply acknowledging comments. Thus, simply acknowledging comments as an obligation on a regular basis does not mean you know how to, and that you actually are willing to, communicate and interact with your readers.

Responding to comments as a reader

If you are a reader and a commentor on a blog, you may or may not like responding to each and every comment addressed to you, or you may or may not like responding to comments that revolve around your comment. You may even have the habit of tackling and addressing each comment on other people’s blog, based on certain criteria such as the type of a blog in question, the type of topic covered, etc.

One thing we should keep in mind is that every blogger can also be a commentor, and every commentor can also be a blogger through the comments, so both bloggers and commentors can also fall into both categories at the same time.

I try my best to respond to each and every comment

I try to respond to everyone on this site, and I try my best to keep up to date with my comments and any due comments on other sites. Sometimes it takes a while, even a few weeks or months, though I try my best to get to everything. For me, late follow-ups are better than no follow-ups. Communicating with others is one of my main priorities.

I just went through all of my comments and e-mails, and unless I have misplaced e-mails or cannot easily find things because of numerous computer backups, I am happy to say that I have responded, via comments, instant messages, e-mails and other channels of communication, to each and every comment and commentor on all of my blogs for the last 7-8 years or so, with the exception of RA Project, Flickrness and Eyeography so far; I should hopefully be able to get to them soon. Responding to comments in my view means communicating with the commentor, and I do that even on the phone [voice or text messages].

Is responding to all comments one of your priorities?

Keeping the above in mind, do you like responding to all blog comments?

Please let me know what your opinion is about this topic, and also whether or not you think responding to all comments is necessary. Thank you.

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You may forget bloggers who helped you in different ways

I have realized that many times, when bloggers get what they want, like an increasing number of comments or blog popularity, they forget or deliberately ignore the bloggers who helped them reach that stage. If you are such a blogger, once you become famous or achieve some blogging goals, you may start ignoring the small time bloggers who may have given you advice before, while focusing no more prominent bloggers.

You may also simply start linking less to the bloggers who helped you in the past, even if they write great quality content. You may also tend to e-mail or IM them less, while interacting with new, famous bloggers more. One of the reasons you may forget some people who helped you in the past is that those bloggers may not have helped you before in ways you wanted to be helped, but now that you have achieve some blog popularity, they may be offering a lot of help to you.

Have you forgotten the bloggers who helped you? Have you been forgotten by other bloggers?

What is your opinion on this? Do you still keep in touch with the bloggers who helped you improve, directly or indirectly? Do you know of bloggers who asked for your help before, but now that they consider themselves to be more popular, they stopped contacting you?

Thank you for reading.

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1. Infatuated with Stats

   Your blogging depends on checking your blog stats. If you get a lot of traffic on one day, your whole life seems happy. Otherwise, you feel depressed and may think that you are doing something wrong. For you, RSS feed subscriber count, site visitors, and similar numbers are more important than blogging or your blog content itself.

2. Yearning for Comments

   You write to get comments, even if what you write does not deserve any comments. You think about commentors not to appreciate them, but to get their comments on your site in order to get more comments on your site. You do not care if you get a useful or a useless comment; you are happy as long as you get a comment.

3. Failure to Have a Back Bone

   When you get criticized, you may feel like shutting down your blog. Just as in real life, there will always be people who may disagree with you. Same is the case with blogs; it is very easy to leave a comment that says “I think that’s stupid.” Be prepared; otherwise, you will not last long in the blogging world, which is fast becoming a very vicious, competitive place. You should probably figure out the Art of Reacting to Criticizing Comments, as you probably do not know how to react to criticizing comments.

4. You are Blinded by Money Prospects

   You blog for money without caring for readers. Period. You write in order to gain sponsors, and you write in order to gain readers who will click on ads. You value and thank sponsors more than your readers. Whether or not you actually ever earn money is a different thing, though you do not focus on what you offer to your readers. For you, the idea that you can try to make money signifies that you are on a noble path, and that you are a hard working person who wants to earn a living. The idea of making money blinds you with such a misconception.

5. You Think You Will be Famous

   Many bloggers simply focus on getting attention for the sake of getting attention, and if you are one of them, you will do many random, weird things, including posting random things to please people, just to try to be famous. You do not realize that being a real famous person means you do things naturally that result in someone noticing that you do those things, thus making you a famous person. You do not work on becoming famous. You work on doing important things that can make others believe that you are famous. You also do not realize that becoming famous does not mean you did something good; you could be doing relatively evil things, even in your own view, and getting attention. All you want is attention.

6. You Think You Can Actually Make a Difference

   We all want to do something in our lives, hopefully. Many people think that they can change the world or the blogosphere overnight. If you are such a person, you may be wanting to change things right away, without changing yourself first. Sure, it is not necessary to change yourself all the time, though if you do not know first hand what the change feels like, how can you expect to change the world, since you would not know how to achieve such a change. If your blogging relies on making a difference, you may be disappointed. Blogging in order to try to infuse an idea of a change in people is a much more realistic goal, as voluntary change is more permanent and more effective than an overnight, emotional, emotionally manipulated or forced change.

7. You Think You Can Make People Change

   It can be next to impossible to convince many people to stop drinking coffee. Yet, many people think that they can change the entire lives of others simply by giving them a lecture or two. Blogging in order to tell people that they are wrong and that they should change can be a sign that you do not know how human interaction works.

8. You Blame Others for Your Blog Problems

   If your site goes down, you blame your host. If the number of commentors you get on a regular basis goes down, you blame others for not linking to you enough. If your RSS feed subscriber base shrinks, you blame the blogging advice others give you. You never blame yourself. Every choice you make on your blog is your choice, so blaming others all the time for your blog problems is a very naïve thing to do. If someone forced you at gunpoint or threatened to do something, like shutting down your blog if you do not do what they say, then sure, go ahead and blame that someone. Otherwise, stop blaming and start thinking. Thinking while crying is better than crying and blaming someone else.

9. You Rely on the Latest Blog Fad

   If a famous blogger talks about it, you talk about it. If others are using the same gadget on their blogs, you want to use it on your blog too. You follow the trend simply because there is a trend to be followed. You do not follow things because they make sense. You follow things because you are naïve.

10. You step on others to get ahead without realizing the political consequences

    This may be surprising to you. If you use people for your own personal gain, you are probably a naïve blogger. You have to understand that using tactics to manipulate people may result in many people being blinded easily at the moment, but as time passes and new trends and views come to surface, more and more people will start realizing that you used them without appreciating them, or without giving them anything useful in return. You are naïve because you try to use people without realizing how such an action will be noticed by others. You simply want to use people and get away with it.

This list will surely help me focus on my blogging more. I hope such a list will help you also, by allowing you to identify similar traits not only in your own blogging style but also in others. Sometimes, a blogger may simply be naïve and may not want to hurt others intentionally. Other times, a blogger may be naïve because they want to use others and they do not think of any consequences.

What is your view on this? Do you agree or disagree with something? Can you think of more points that may be a signify someone being a naïve blogger?

Thank you for reading.

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Controlling stress does not mean we have no stress

Controlling a situation can be an interesting thing, though controlling a stressful situation does not mean a person is able to handle the situation. A person could be able to negotiate their way out of an argument, but they may be feeling alienated from the person they argued with. A person may be able to clear a misunderstanding, but that person may also end up severing their relationship with someone else in the long run. A person may even be able to fix critical problems on their blog and avoid any damage, though they may end up acting rude for a long time to online people, or even acting different in the offline world.

We may be transferring online stress to the other parts of life

Whatever change that results in a person after or during a stressful situation, it can be because of the stressful situation. We may be inclined to think that we become moody because our friend calls us too much while we blog, though in reality we may be becoming moody anytime we blog. We may not be realizing that we are shifting our stress onto different things instead of actually working on reducing the stress itself. We may think blogging is not stressing us, but we may be feeling stress from lack of sleep, lack of enough food, lack of having friends, lack of exercising, lack of relaxing time, or almost anything else in the offline world. In reality, those other forms of stress may have been born because of our initial and real stress that may be stemming because of blogging, or any other online activity or situation.

Online stress and offline stress both have one thing in common: Stress

So far, I am noticing that people are treating online stress completely different than offline stress. I think there are differences between online stress and offline stress, the same way there are differences between different kinds of offline stress. However, one thing that many bloggers are forgetting is that both online and offline stress result in us being stressed. The critical element to consider is not that we experience and want to handle online stress, but that we are handling stress. Once we realize that, we can focus on the online nature of some stress in order to come up with a good way to try to reduce or eliminate the stress.

What do you think? Do you handle online stress the same way you handle offline stress? Do you think that handling online stress sometimes does not work as we may start stressing in the offline world, as a result of online stress? Do you think I am on the right track to tackling this issue?

Thanks for reading.

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1. Getting into arguments with other bloggers

   Arguments in the offline world can result in married couples and best friends hating each other forever, so it is no surprise that even the smallest of online arguments can result in powerful grudges. Just like any argument, just because you argue logically or think you are right does not mean you will be appreciated for voicing your opinion. An argument itself should be avoided, since forcing someone to agree with you contradicts the idea of making someone believe in something voluntarily. Also, bloggers should try to disagree with arguments, not with people who argue.

   If you argue online for business reasons, it is better to end the argument as soon as possible and to move on, since continuous arguments about something mean that either the issue should be ignored or the business deal should be reconsidered. Getting into an argument with someone, where the blogosphere sides with your “opponent“, can result in you and your blog being sent to the blog hell, resulting in you getting less attention, fewer blog comments, and even fewer ways to find inspiration to build back your affected reputation. Sometimes, it is very hard to improve a damaged reputation because of the way the online world looks at how or why you argue in arguments.

2. Punished by search engines

   Search engine optimization [SEO] is something that many bloggers, if not most, focus on. If you pay close attention to many prominent blogs and their bloggers, you will realize that they usually focus more on SEO than their readers or even their content. While such a thing may seem evil, consider this: if a blogger upsets one reader, that blogger can rebuild that relationship, or replace it with another relationship with some other reader; it happens regularly, even if that sounds evil too. However, if you upset a search engine like Google or Yahoo, you may end up losing most readers forever since it is hard to rebuild good relationships with search engines.

   Some blogs get more than 90% of their readers and commentors through search engines, because many people find those blog through their search engine searches. If a search engine bans or punishes your for any reason, you may be in a blog hell because you will have to start depending on other sources to bring in more people to your blog. Imagine having a bookstore on a street where the only way you find new customers is through newspaper ads. Now imagine all newspapers not placing your ads anymore for some reason. You will probably worry that you might run out of business. That is how your blog can be if you upset search engines for various reasons.

3. Being criticized by a famous blogger

   For many bloggers, there is nothing more shocking than having a very famous blogger criticize them in public. If you are a blogger who is suffering the wrath of some prominent blogger’s anger, you may have said or done something on your blog that the other blogger may not like saying or doing themselves. Take the issue of MyBlogLog banning Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, because he posted MyBlogLog security exploits in public. Arguing about something or having issues does create tensions, though when the entire blogosphere joins in, reputations can go either up or down really fast. Overall, MyBlogLog was criticized more heavily than Jeremy, and one of the reasons for that was because the criticism was started publicly by Jeremy first. One way for you to avoid such a scenario is to avoid telling someone that they are wrong.

   If you get criticized by a famous blogger, you may feel the blog world crashing on you. Your reputation may be on the line, and you may feel the need to either accept all blame and apologize, or to go out fighting like an action hero or heroine. The way MyBlogLog tried to correct the situation was by Eric from MyBlogLog posting an apology to ShowMoney online, and by explaining briefly how his action was justified, and how he could have done some things differently. Sometimes, accepting a criticism after fighting it for a while can be a good thing also, if you feel that not giving up on something may be hurting other more important goals in the long run. If you are worried about a small criticizing comment left by someone, you may want to refer to the Art of Reacting to Criticizing Comments for further guidance.

4. Technical issues resulting in loss of the site or readers

   This is something that allows many people to regularly visit the blog hell for a few hours or even for a few days. Such technical issues can range from your domain name expiring to you accidentally deleting all your older posts and comments on your blog without having a backup. Sometimes, your host could also simply go down for even a few days, resulting in many frustrated readers and commentors of your blog to never come back.

   Technical issues can also result from sites getting hacked due to exploits in software like Wordpress. Whatever the reason, your site may be down and your blog readers may not be able to access or comment on your blog. It can be a nightmare for you, and the time you spend trying to worry or fix the problem is actually the time you are in a blog hell. You just feel the heat more mentally than physically, unless you have the heater on.

5. Losing interest in your own blog

   This is the point that allows most bloggers to be in denial that they are not in a blog hell. Many blogs that you see today will have their owners losing interest in blogging within a year. After a long time of staying away from blogs or even posting random stuff just to fulfill the obligation of blogging, they will start gaining interest in blogging again. Many other priorities in life result in many bloggers focusing less and less on blogging, and many bloggers could simply be having writer’s block for a long time, resulting in loss of interest in blogging or even writing. By the time a used-to-be-a-blogger wants to reclaim the blogging fame that he or she once had, it may be a hundred times harder to regain the same success as before.

   It depends on each blogger whether they feel they are in a blog hell when they are losing interest in blogging, or if they feel like being in a blog hell when they try to bring their blog back up to its former glory and it just is not happening easily. Either way, the offline world plays a major role in deciding our interest in the online world, since even if we blog all day, we still sleep and eat in the offline world, thus giving some kind of an unconscious preference to the importance of the offline world compared to the online world.

That is my list of 5 of the many things that result in many bloggers getting a train ticket to Blog Hell. Some people are lucky and get a round trip ticket, though many people are not so lucky and get only a one way, first class train ticket to Blog Hell where it is hard to bring the blog out of some specific misery.

What is your opinion on this? Please let me know if you can think up of other things that result in people experiencing the scorching fires of the Blog Hell. Thank you for reading.

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Stereotypes about money prompt many bloggers to lie that they do not blog to make money

Many bloggers will use different topics like death, charity or even personal family pictures to lure you to their blogs. However, these bloggers will usually not admit that they blog only to make you click on ads. Not admitting that fact is a sign of a narrow minded mentality, stemming from generations of stereotypes against the idea of someone being rich and good at the same time. Why would anyone want to admit that they post pictures of their parents and children only to make money, right?

Even supposed selfless causes depend on making money, so why would you hide the fact that you blog just for money?

Avoid portraying your blog as if it was a stereotypical Non Profit Organization (NPO) that focused only on helping others and not on making money. In reality, even NPOs have to make money in order to pay their employees and operations, so why would you want to feel guilty and hide the fact, through deception, that you want your blog to make you money?

The less you deceive your blog readers about your true intentions related to making money through your blog, the more transparent and comfortable you will feel in actually providing something useful to your readers.

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Does being popular or an A-list blogger mean that you are mature?

Some of the A-list bloggers I have met so far do not know how to interact, communicate, help others, or even how to give and take at the same time, both online and offline. They simply focus on taking and not on giving anything back. Because of A-list bloggers being famous, many people assume that these “famous” bloggers are mature. That makes me wonder whether some people actually care about maturity or not when it comes to a blogger and the content that blogger produces.

How do you measure a blogger’s maturity level?

In order to measure a blogger’s maturity level, you probably need to have at least an idea of how to measure maturity level in general. However, how do you measure anyone’s maturity? Why are rich bloggers being cited as being mature simply because of the traffic their blogs generate, even when people do not know anything personal about those bloggers? Does the level of maturity depend on the amount of traffic and money ones generates through a blog?

What do you think? I am going to post more on this soon.

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What are niches and subniches?

A niche is simply another word for specialization, or a specific category for something. For example, the newspaper industry is a category, and newspapers focusing on traffic in your city have a very specific niche, or specialization, in the broader, more general newspaper industry. Chris Garrett wrote an article on the concept of niches on Performancing back in 2005, which you may find interesting. You may also read a post by Anthony Baggett in which he talked about his site Antbag focusing on not focusing on a niche.

I am not sure if other people use the same word, but a “subniche” is a word I just came up with, while talking with Valerie, to express how someone can specialize within something that has already been assumed to be specialized in by other people.

By a subniche, I am simply referring to a subcategory within a broader category, which can be a niche. Many people consider a niche to be a very specific and a very targeted category of something. In my view, however, as the blogging world starts to mature further, we need to start focusing on targets within targets, and subcategories within categories. Thus, in my view, a subniche is a specific niche within a niche.

Personal blogging niche is the most crowded, yet one of the most underdeveloped blogging niches on the internet

The personal blogging arena is one of the most under-developed blogging niches on the internet. The personal blogging market has without much doubt become very crowded, but personal bloggers are not yet specializing in specific personal blogging subcategories. Sure, we can read all sorts of personal posts ranging from cats attacking their owners to bloggers using their keyboards to play baseball. However, most of such personal blog posts are random. They move from one topic to another, trying their best to be the perfect examples of a personal blog:

Since a personal life has a lot of random things happening every minute, why can personal blogs not focus on everything at the same time, all the time?

That very question is the reason there are too many general personal blogs on the internet today, since many people think that personal bloggers do not have to follow any rules or guidelines, and can simply post whatever they wish, whenever they wish and however they wish. That same question is also the reason personal blogs have yet to mature into more specific and specialized forms.

Many, if not most, personal blogs are too random

Majority of the personal blogs today are too general in their writing. Personal blogging is thought by many to have no clear focus because of the misunderstanding that personal blogs must treat personal lives as being too big and general. Personal bloggers have yet to stake claims in different types of personal blogs. If you look deep enough, you will realize that the personal blogging niche can be broken down into dozens, of not hundreds, of sub-topics or subniches that different personal bloggers can choose from to focus on.

Bes Z’s 7 Types of Personal Blogging Subniches

To give you an example of what I mean by personal blogging subniches, I present to you the following 7 subcategories of the main personal blogging niche that need to be developed and specialized further in my view. I came up with the different subniche names to help you remember what each subniche is all about.

1. Personal Emotions Blogging

   Emotional blogging, or Emo blogging, usually revolves around emotions. Personal Emotional Bloggers talk about emotions they feel daily due to different things. This is a very specific niche where people talk about emotions they feel daily due to all sorts of random things. This can be divided further into smaller categories, where different emotions are categorized based on things that trigger such emotions.

2. Personal Criticism Blogging

   This is the kind of personal blog where a blogger critically analyzes different things and probably criticizes things. Personal Criticism Bloggers may even be critical of their own actions, feelings and emotions, and will explain such criticisms in their criticizing posts. People in such a subniche may focus simply on criticizing things they run into in their daily lives, including their own selves.

3. Personal Positive/Negative Blogging

   These kinds of personal blogs focus on the positive and negative things that are seen in daily lives. Personal Positive/Negative Bloggers do not need to criticize things, though they can talk specifically about things they like and things they do not like. Again, this is a very specific niche that needs to be specialized in.

4. Personal Relationships blogging

   This can be a big separate category on its own. Many personal bloggers talk about relationships in their lives. Such relationships range from dating relationships to relationships with parents, and even business relationships. This subcategory of life, relationships with others, can be specialized in very easily by many personal bloggers who already post a lot about their analysis of the relationships they observe and the relationships they themselves run into daily. A Personal Relationships Blogger may even devote their entire blog to one specific relationship, like relationship with their child, a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or even a friendly relationship with a specific neighbor.

5. Personal Moods blogging

   Many people go through mood swings every hour of the day, and my recent series on moody signs of moody people may have shed some more light on the topic for you. Personal Moods Bloggers can specialize on moody blogging, where they either blog about their mood swings, or they blog because of their mood swings. I think this can be one of the most random type of blogging types out there, as such bloggers can change the entire focus of their blogs based on their moods.

   While many personal blogs today talk about random things because of feeling the need to write such things on specific days, you should know that Personal Moods Blogs will be different than the usual types of blogs we see today, as Personal Mood Blogs depend solely on the mood swings and revolve around the mood swings and talk about mood swings as being influential, whereas today’s blogs simply post random stuff because of feeling different everyday. A Personal Moods Blogger specifically outlines the mood swings that cause different blog posts to be written.

6. Personal Feelings Blogging

   Feelings blogs can usually revolved around 2 specific feelings: happy feelings and unhappy feelings. Personal bloggers can also specialize in confused feelings if they wish. Personal Feelings Bloggers can talk either about the things that made them happy unhappy, or confused, or the things that happened because of the bloggers feeling happy or unhappy, or even confused. The same way Personal Moods Bloggers rely on moods to run and revolve their blogs around and explain the moods behind their posts, Personal Feelings Bloggers run and revolve their blogs around feelings, and actually cite those feelings so that readers can know which happy, unhappy or even confusing feelings caused which actions or blog posts to be written, and why.

7. General/Random Personal Blogging

   This is the type of personal blogs you see today. General or Random Personal Bloggers can blog about anything, as they try to cover the concept of personal blogs in general and in depth while at the same time covering everything in their lives that they can. Thus, many of the personal bloggers you see today could continue to blog about personal things, since that would become a specialty of its own.

Those are 7 of the many other Personal Blogging Subniches that can be developed further by personal bloggers. Since the very concept of a personal daily life is probably unique to almost every blogger, the possibilities are endless when it comes to creating a subniche within the main personal blogging category.

Life is full of different things. Personal blogs should also specialize in different personal things instead of not specializing in anything.

The fact that life itself is full of random things when analyzed with care makes many personal bloggers forget the fact that life is divided into smaller parts, and that personal blogs can also be divided into smaller parts with each part dealing with a specific part of life. There is a lot of potential for specialization and categorization within the main personal blogging niche.

The personal blogging niche is far from being crowded, because of the possibilities of having personal blogging subniches. In fact, I think the personal blogging niche has the highest growth potential than any other type of blogging niche, because it focuses on life. Life itself probably has no boundaries other than death, and many would argue that even death is not a sign of a limitation of life. Why, then, should personal blogs focus on life with only one perspective, the general perspective, when personal blogs can instead focus on life in depth by talking about specific and different things?

Wait! What about people who think personal blogging is not a niche at all?!

Of course, many people still say that personal blogs are not niches at all, that they are too general or boring to have any kind of a niche. For such people, the very concept of having subniches within the personal blogging niche may have sounded weird throughout this article. Many people take the fact that some prominent bloggers got their blogging ideas from their personal blogging, like Darren Rowse talking about getting an idea for a niche from his personal blog, to assume that personal blogs are not niches. Personal blogs are niches. Making money from niches is a completely different topic and issue to pursue, and should not be confused with the concept of what niches are, and how and why personal blogs are niches.

I am working on an article, to be published soon, that talks about the reasons why and how personal blogging is definitely a niche.

Thank you, and please let me know what you think!

Please let me know what you think of this article, and about the 7 different subniches I mentioned. Also, please let me know whether or not you agree that personal blogging is itself a niche. Thank you for reading.

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It is a good thing to tell people to donate. It is an even better thing to donate yourself. However, in my view, it is not a good thing to use the poor and homeless people, who need help, to get yourself more comments. Manipulating people’s emotions to get more clicks and comments on your site so that you can donate to charity means that you are not willing to help others without getting something back along the way. For many blogs, more comments mean more traffic, which results in more money through ads. Thus, you are simply going to give charity only if you can get more customers.

What happens if you do not get even a single comment? Are you going to change your rules and donate anyhow? Why not donate right away in the first place when people are dying because of hunger and other things every single hour, instead of playing marketing gimmicks on innocent people’s lives so that you can get more traffic and more comments on your blog?

Do not let innocent lives hang on a thread simply because you crave for more comments

If you want to tell people to donate, go ahead. But if you want to donate yourself, do it without any hesitation, and do it without being selfish or without looking for a return investment. The people who are in need have done nothing bad to you, so try to help them and not base your donations on the number of customers or comments you get. That is not respectful to the people in need, as their lives are worth more than the number of comments you will ever receive.

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How Reader Appreciation Project started

Ronald Huereca originally approached me earlier this year to see if such a project could be started. I was excited over such an opportunity, since I see so many people pretending to appreciate others but in reality they only use others. So the two of us, along with Shawn Blanc, decided to brainstorm together. I would like to present to you the RA Project, which is the result of the brainstorm, and a lot of chicken tenders from Burger King.

Some basic ways Reader Appreciation Project pays you for not doing anything more than what you already do

Please take a look around the site and let me know. This entire project depends on you. Not only that, Ronald has posted a nice post explaining how you can get many prizes from the RA Project. You can win prizes, get money, get coupons and get more things. The best thing about all of this is that you do not have to do anything, since the time you spend reading and commenting on the site already helps us!

You already come to the site and comment, and that is enough. I do not want you to go through extra steps so we can benefit a lot while we give you $10 for your efforts and call it a form of “appreciation.” I want to spread the mentality that the mere fact you read a blog or comment on it means that you have done that blog a huge favor. I want all of us to focus on how to repay that favor.

Thank you for supporting me so far!

You can not only participate by leaving comments on the RA Project site but you can also write posts for the site. Please contact me personally if you are interested.

Thanks for being a good reader of mine all this time. I hope the new project increases awareness that we have to appreciate people not only through words but through actions also.

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While not being able to drive fast, I found some space among slow drivers

As I said in February, driving up the 5 North reminded me of different situations in other parts of life. One of the things I noticed was that finding elements to reduce boredom due to blogging helps. I also noticed that whenever I drove up a steep hill on the freeway, my car would slow down because of the amount of power required to drive up at fast speeds. I had to slow down and drive in the slower lanes on the right hand side in order to let the faster traffic pass by. Even though I had slowed down, I was still headed in the same direction as the faster cars. There was no reason for me to compete and race with those cars. Competing with myself was better.

Your blog is like your car in a similar situation. Whatever goals you may have in mind, you can move towards them regardless of your speed. If you feel your plans or efforts are not working, you can continue aiming for your goals at a slower pace to make sure you keep doing something useful while you figure out the reasons behind the issues you face. If you feel that slowing down will hurt a deadline you may have, you should try to start early on future efforts, including any efforts and plans for observing and solving the issues you already may be facing.

When facing issues, first thing you should do is to slow down and observe

One way to find out why you may feel that you are facing issues is by slowing down and observing the things you consider important for your blog. If you think the number of comments or RSS feed subscribers is important, then not getting enough comments or subscribers may feel like a problem. Observing the things that affect commenting and RSS feed subscriptions can allow you to find out where the problems may be, even if the problems exist in other aspects of your blog. Stopping because of experiencing problems or disappointments is not a good idea. Slow down instead of stopping first, and then decide what to do after observing your goals and the problems.

Finding other blogs which are facing similar issues can be helpful. You can even ask other bloggers politely about the reasons why their blogs face those issues, while also telling them that the reason you ask is because you are facing similar issues. You can even look at sites getting a lot of comments and RSS subscribers to figure out why those sites are more successful at achieving the goals you are having problems with. If content is the sole reason why a site is getting more comments or subscribers, then you should see if content is the only main reason you are not getting enough comments or subscribers on your site.

Avoid competing with others when you face issues

If you face challenges in achieving your goals, you can try setting up new plans to achieve the same goals. You should slow down your blogging efforts instead of giving them up in order to figure out why you are facing problems. Try not to compare your blogs with others. Do not compete with others; compete only with your own expectations. You should not base your efforts on what others do, but on what you can and want to do. Otherwise, you are basing all your efforts on something that others control. You want to avoid that.

As for my car driving up on steep hills, it just kept on going and going, like an energized rabbit. I did notice a few trucks pass by me a few times. In those situations, I tried to get ahead of them. If you are bored going up a hill and do not have an automobile companion, you can setup short term goals for a few seconds to reduce boredom, like going faster than speeding trucks for a few moments.

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How people are misunderstanding some of the results

The survey ran from November 20th to December 4th, on around 40-50 English language blogs, and on 12 Spanish language blogs. The number of people responding to each survey question varied. You should realize that just because a survey was done consisting of many blogs does not mean the same rule will apply to you and your blog; that survey helps many blogs, but you have to find out if it helps your blog. It also means that you now have a conflict on your hands, since if you aim to do what the majority of the survey respondents wanted, you will not be pleasing the rest of the blog readers.

Following are some results from the report, and how people are jumping to conclusions based the results:

• 67.3% people surveyed follow links on other blogs in order to find new sites.

  This is an impressive number. 67.3% would be considered the majority in a democratic society. Online, such a survey percentage means that if you link to another blog, most of the people will click that link. I am noticing that many people online are assuming that such a result means having links in posts is guaranteed to work for majority of the readers. My question is simple: How can you assume something to work on the almost billion of online users or even millions of blog readers based on a survey question taken by 214 people? Are you too desperate to hold on to numbers in order to stick with what you stubbornly believe in?

  Also, what about the other 33.7% of the people who do not follow links on blogs? They find blogs through other methods. Should you try to please everyone, or should you only please the majority?

• 43.6% prefer a topical focus.

  It is funny how in other areas of the report, people focus on the majority numbers, whereas in this specific question, many people focused on the 43.6%. A topical focus means a specific topic. That means 43.6% people like to read a blog that has a specific topic that it talks about on a regular basis. While people are jumping and saying “Yes! I always knew having a focused blog was good!“, I would like to remind those people that they also jump for other parts of the survey when majority of the respondents agree to something, but in this case, they are not jumping to the majority 57.4% of the blog readers who read blogs that do not have a topical focus.

  Again, should you apply this very result to your site when it was taken by 263 people? We also do not know about all the topics involved, and we do not know if the topical blog readers were influenced because of finding topics based on language. Can you really go ahead and jump to conclusions based on this? In this case, having a topical blog actually makes you disappoint the majority 57.4%, the majority which you were trying to please in other questions.

• 76.9% of the readers do not post comments on blogs.

  76.9% of the people on the survey, which consisted of 281 people for this specific question, do not like to comment. Does that mean you have to get rid of comments from your blog? How come we all say we value commenting and we say we love pleasing the majority of the people, but we skip this very important result from this survey?

  Again, we should see whether or not the results are affected because of the language, and also because of the time frame when the survey was done, which was for most part a busy holiday season. Also, are the blog readers from the survey the same as the blog readers you have? That is an important question that you need to survey yourself to find out the answer to.

• Spanish speakers read more blogs than English speakers.

  This is also an interesting one that is making many people run around in circles with joy for unknown reasons. According to the survey, there are 2 major results:

  1. 30.8% of the 263 English speaking blog readers read 3-4 blogs regularly.
  2. 43.3% of the 300 Spanish speaking blog readers read more than 10 blogs regularly.

  These two results are making some believe that Spanish blogs are more fun, while some are saying that this means Spanish speaking blog readers are simply hop from one site to another without reading much. My question to such people who are happy with such results is: have you noticed the number of Spanish blogs surveyed compared to the English blogs?

  Comparing 300 people from 12 Spanish blogs with 263 people from more than 40 English speaking blogs is far from a balanced comparison. Such a result means that the 300 Spanish speaking people have more things in common because they hang around those 12 blogs, while the survey for English readers was done on more than 40 blogs meaning there will be more people who will have differences because of the large number of blogs involved for English readers compared to Spanish readers. How can such a result be applied to any blog out of the blue?

I hope the above examples show you that such a survey is extremely important in understanding human behavior on blogs. However, such a survey is also a very bad reason to use when implementing things on our sites or sticking to what we believe unless we know our blog and our blog readers are compatible with the survey. Of course, many blogs love claiming that they have always been right because of the survey results. I would like to claim that generalizing ideas about millions of blog readers who visit millions of blogs based on a study of around 200-300 people visiting a total of around 52-62 blogs is something that people would do in the offline world if they wanted to create stereotypes.

How should we report and react to such surveys then?

I like the way Daniel reported the Blog Readership Report on Daily Blog Tips; he mentioned some of the important facts, and left the analysis of those facts up to you. I think all facts should be mentioned that way without jumping to conclusions, instead of saying things that do not have any ground to stand on.

Learn from the survey and see how it applies to you. Instead of only promoting numbers that you find attractive, understand everything. If you do not read the report yourself and understand it correctly, why would your blog readers read your analysis of the report? Do not rush to conclusions simply because it makes for a good blog post. When studied carefully, the number of people and blogs in the survey shows who can use the information from the survey. It also shows who needs to do their own survey on their own blogs to confirm the existence of specific trends.

This survey gives us an idea of what happens on some blogs. It does not give us proof that the same will happen on our blog. I would recommend doing your own survey or even contacting Vizu to see how they did the survey as they already have experience doing a great job with this report.

If you wish, you can download the Blog Readership Report PDF file, which requires a free PDF viewing software like Foxit PDF Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader. Both are free to download and use.

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