Subtitle: Finding your blog's why
Have you ever seen this question: How do you measure influence or success?
What is really being asked is what makes you happy? Or, by what outcome will you be satisfied?
Maslow
Different blogs have different reasons of purpose, but since I believe everything that we can possibly create or do can be traced back to ourselves, I propose that there may only be 5 (five) reasons a blog exists:
This may seem like a stretch, but hear me out:
- Self-actualization - artistic, creative, writing blogs
- Esteem - scholarly, expert blogs
- Love/belonging - blog groups, hobbies, family
- Safety - non-profit or blogs centered around causes
- Physiological - blogs that provide an income, or to court potential mates, causes
Yup, Psych 101. And if you're still with me, let's take another step: A Blogger: Making you see the World their Way = influence. To keep your message going, you'll need to convince people to keep reading (hopefully, I'm not losing your readership here LOL).
So, we're looking to fill our 'needs' which keeps us happy and hope to wield some degree of influence to continue its propagation.
Simple.
My Reasons
This blog leans toward my perspective on Latino social media as opposed to being an echo chamber (not necessarily a negative thing). Some posts that I really enjoy writing flop and surprising, others do better than expected. My audience are the governance: They tell me what is wanted via traffic, comments and links - this is inline with some of the reasons why I blog.
Another part is of an artistic nature: It is our function as artists bloggers to make the spectator reader see the world our way, not his way (Adolph Gottlieb - edited). This is what makes me happy/satisfied.
I think with some bloggers the above is more obvious than others. If you keep peeling back the layers you can see how this is applies.
What do you think?