At this point in your blogging “career,” what is your main motivation of keeping it up?
1) Friendship and connection to other like-minded people without having to leave the house to meet smelly “real people.”
2) Literary ambitions. Wanting to gain attention from agents and publishers and magazines and the Huffington Post so you can move to a higher level of friends, and stop reading the poorly-written blogs of most of the people who you used to call your friends.
3) Cheap therapy. You are mildly nuts. You know it, we know it. You might as well exploit it, and tell us all about it. Every day. Because it helps.
4) Blogging bigshot dreams. This is mostly relevant to mommybloggers. You fantasize becoming one of the Walmart 11 Mommybloggers or the Domino Pizza 12 Mommybloggers, so you can feel better than your friends, constantly reminding them about your power, even though you repeatedly say you are doing it all for “them.”
5) Financial Empire building. You want to turn your blog into a business, and hope to get a lot of free stuff from companies. You consider yourself a social media expert, and sell yourself as one. You pose as a blogging maven, telling others how to do it successfully, when basically — in your heart — you know it is mostly writing something with the keyboard and pressing publish, not much different that what we used to call “writing letters.” You have 15,000 friends on Twitter, but don’t know who any of them are. Or you take the opposite approach and follow 3 friends, using the old-fashioned “hard to get” technique so successful in dating. Your blog is basically a business card for your “real” endeavor, which is to take over the world.
6) Hopeless individual. You have no real idea why you are still blogging. It is a time waster, and you make no money doing it. You worry about the bad economy, and it scares you. You have not gotten laid by any of the female bloggers that you make believe that you care about, except for that sole sexy email chat a few months ago that never went anywhere. Married female bloggers don’t even want to give you their phone numbers because of their lame “husbands.” But you keep at it, at least until BlogHer in July. Because you are a dreamer.
