What it takes to be called a blogger? By owning a blog and writing 2-3 articles? It’s up to you if this is what you understand about blogging. Not everyone is on the same page when it comes to its definition.
Along any blogging journey, one should have different kinds of feelings about their blogging career (or activity). Sometimes, it’s a good one, the one that you want to taste more often. But occasionally, it is not as good as that. Most of the time, this will subsequently let you down, kill your mood to blog.
I put little effort today, to figure out what it really is being a blogger to me. You may have your own if you want. If you answer YES on 80% of the criteria below, you’re a true blogger. Really??
1. You don’t care how much you earn. Be it on a day where your earn less or more or even 0.00
2. You don’t care what your ranking is. You become PR0blogger, Google slaps, Alexa change its ranking system, or even hosting outage does not make you furious or even frustrated
3. You care how your blogs looks like, optimize the SEO, broken links and all other criterias that’s important for any blogs to last long in blog sphere
4. You strive to produce quality contents for your reader.
5. You blog as frequent as you want, regardless of how busy you are. You even try to steal time from your hectic schedule to write a post a day or a week
6. You try to answer each comments. You check your spam comment section on daily basis to ensure no legitimate comments stuck inside
7. You don’t care what others say about you. Your friends or family who has no visibility of what you’re doing might say that you’re just wasting your time. Try to explain to them that what you’re doing is for your own good.
8. Bad economical or political situation in your country does not become a burden or excuse for you to stop blogging.
9. You don’t forget to renew your blog on time, every year.
10. You don’t care how much is your RSS reader, or how many people reads your blog
11. You help other blogger-wanna-be or new bloggers to kick off their own blog and guide them to be as excellent as you are.
12. You socialize with other bloggers, in social networking websites or even in real world such as blog meet-up or gathering.
13. You read other blogs and sometimes leave comments and actively involved in any discussions
14. You contribute something back to blogging community. It is not necessarily something that’s visible such as plugin or themes, it could be advice, tips, how tos and etc
15. Don’t forget to remind people around you that blog is NOT only centered about POLITICS as some of us understand. It is a damn lot more things than that
17. You keep humble and down to earth attitude after you’ve become a prominent blogger
16. You write the truth and only the truth
), I try refrain myself from switching theme too often because of numbers of features that I have to hard coded into the new theme every time I decide to change.
).
Silence is golden for spams?
Akismet has caught 60,128 spam for you since you first installed it.
That is the (lucky) number of spams I have received so far. Within 16 months in existence, that’s translated to over 3,758 per months. Pretty huge for a blog like this.
Why on earth am I suddenly talking about spams? No la, it’s just that I’m doing some housekeeping, cleaning up the mess over here and there. Upgrading here and there. Plus minus putting a little touch up on the theme (I’m still feeling slightly lazy writing).
I don’t have the number, but based on the number of comments moderated, I feel that spammer has ‘dropped by’ more than usual. Like unmanned house, which tends to get exposed to burglary higher than manned house, the same fate goes to blogs, I guess.
It’s not really bothering me, but I’m glad that they are still willing to drop by even when I’m not around.. Lol. At least I got someone taking care of blogjer….
Besides, I found lots of comments like below pending approval (I moderate first time commentators). It is not marked as spams (indeed, since they’re not viewed as spams by Akismet), but it is valid comment in the form of spam.
hey nice post.
I will check it out.
interesting site it really learns me a lot…
Are you going to approve it? Well, to me, it depends.. if the post is about tutorial, foods, games, it definitely makes sense, but if the post is about disaster or announcement, the comments will be ‘buried’ right away. Imagine ‘I’ll try it out’ comment for ‘This is not Bill Gates’s daughter‘ post, funny rite. Try what???
For little blogs like this, i don’t think readers will care too much if their comment is deleted accidently, but be considerate..