In a recent posting, Seth was speaking to me directly..."There are literally millions of bloggers that have become so focused on measurable traffic that they end up posting nonsense designed to do nothing but attract a Digg. Look back at a blog like that a month later and it appears to be a series of gimmicks, all designed to maximize a metric that's almost totally irrelevant to what the blogger set out to do in the first place"..When I first started blogging, it was supposed to be about me..what I'm feeling like today, what I'm doing to increase blah-blah, you get the idea..Somewhere in the greed of it all, yes the greed for traffic, my "jump the shark" moment came when I wrote "What your hair style says about you"..My daily clicks were not growing at a rate I was satisfied with, so I took the low road. Of course, this happened to be my most visited article by a long shot..and off I was..Grabbing catchy phrases and regurgitating stories for a few more clicks..Then around Christmas, a friend asked why I stopped writing about myself..I had too much ego to say that a "Top 10" list was more interesting than stories about Huey...But it made me reconsider why I am blogging in the first place..I like to write about what I like to write about..Once you start writing for the clicks you are no longer working for yourself..Blogging becomes a job...After that moment, I realized that to be successful you have to be original and interesting, a true to yourself..Score is not kept on Sitemeter. The real score is measured by the enjoyment you get from writing freely.
