How Blogging Is Like A Marriage

With the recent marriage issues I’ve been having, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking , and I realized that blogging is a lot like marriage.  It has its ups and downs, as well as its stresses and joys.  But through hard work, determination, and a lot of passion, it can be very rewarding.

To better understand how blogging is like a marriage, we can take a look at marriage vows.  Even if you’re not married, you’ve probably heard them and can even recite them almost perfectly.

To Have & To Hold From This Day Forward

This marks the beginning of your blogging journey.  It’s the time when you’re most nervous about the road ahead, and it can at times be a scary thing.

You’re not sure when your blog will start to really take-off, or if it even will.

You’re committing yourself to long hard hours and a lot of time away from other things to which you’ve become accustomed.

Before you even start your blog, you need to make sure you’re in it for the long haul, no matter how long that is.  If you’re not, when you come across a stumbling block , you’ll have a hard time not folding.

For Better Or Worse

These stumbling blocks you’ll come across will happen often in the beginning.  And if you can manage to overcome, you’ll notice they happen less as time goes on.

Depending on your goals for your blog, some of your stumbling blocks may include:

1. Traffic Increases or Decreases – This can be somewhat nerve-racking, especially if you’re a statistics watcher.  From day one, you’ll struggle to get someone besides yourself to visit your blog.  But once you succeed, you start the process all over again.

Many bloggers will work very hard to get their first few readers, but think after readers start rolling in, they think they can slack off some.  This is the biggest mistake a blogger can make.  The day you slack off even the slightest bit, is the day your traffic will slack off as well.

Even if you have 20,000 visitors to your blog every day, you should still be marketing your blog just as hard as the day you started.  It’s called hustle… and you should never stop doing it!

2. Subscribers – Subscribers is along the same line as your traffic goals.  You’ll see a fluctuation in these numbers on a daily basis.  Even the best bloggers lose subscribers.

You can please some of the people all of the time, but you can’t please all of the people any of the time.

3. Spammers & Trolls – This is a big part of blogging.  In fact, some say you never really make it to the big time until you have your first spam and troll comments.

A spammer can be easily stopped using a spam blocking plugin on your blog.  For Wordpress, Akismet is built right in, and I’ve never seen anything better for catching spam.

A troll is someone who bad-mouths you, whether anonymously or not.  All you can do is delete these comments as they are made, and hope for the best.  Some troll comments may actually be helpful.  You may find they can give you ideas for blog topics.

For Richer Or Poorer

If you ask anyone currently making money blogging, if that’s the best way to make money online, they’ll tell you no.  With affiliate marketing their are so many easier ways to make money.

Blogging can be a great source of income, but it can be difficult and take years to get to that point.  You have to be patient and know that blogging has other rewards beyond simply making money.

The number one thing to remember is to make sure that you’re doing something you would still do even if you knew you’d never make any money doing it.

In Sickness & In Health

Just like with yourself, your blog can get sick.

No, it won’t throw up on you, but it can have issues, whether it be simply multi-browser compatibility issues, or something as bad as your blog getting hacked and everything destroyed.

There are ways to fight this and to really be there for your blog in it’s time of need.

In one of my recent blog posts I explain how to Increase Security On Your Blog, which helps prevent most hacker attacks.  But if the occasional one does slip past, all you should have to do is re-install the backup you’ve been keeping of your blog.

Wait… you’re not keeping a back-up?  Wrong answer.  Even people get vaccinations, which backup your immune system, so if you ever get an infection, you have something to replace what was destroyed.

You should be doing the same thing with your blog.  There is a Database Backup Management plugin you can get for wordpress blogs that will automatically create backups at whatever frequency you specify.

If you update your blog once weekly, then your probably don’t need to backup but once every couple of weeks, but if you’re like me and post once and sometimes twice daily, you should back-up at least once per week, if not every day.

I backup using the plugin once per week, but my server is set to make backups every day.  This gives me double security should I ever need it.

To Love & To Cherish

Gary Vaynerchuk once said, “If you don’t like what you’re doing, stop!“  No truer words have even been spoken.

To really be successful at blogging, you have to love your topic.  It has to be something you’re intimately passionate about.  Your readers will be able to tell if you’re interested in what you’re writing about, or if you’re writing b.s. all the time just to make a dollar.

If you’re not passionate about your topic, you’ll also notice, as time goes on, that it will become more and more difficult to write posts on a consistent basis.

As Long As We Both Shall Live

If you want to start a blog, and you want to be successful with it, then be there until the end.

Never give up when things start getting rough.  Never surrender when you work for months on trying to increase traffic and only see an increase of one or two people.

If you hit a road block, back up and find a way around it.  There is never one path to your goals.

Becoming successful with your blog reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

In his last stanza Robert talks about how taking one path over another had made a difference in his outcome.  Just like with blogging, the road you choose, will determine your success or failure.

The best part about it?  You can always go back and take the other.

In what other ways does blogging remind you of marriage?