I suspect we’ve all got them—those nagging little blogging insecurities that chatter at you from the back of your mind every once in a while (or more regularly). While we probably all have them, none of us talk about them. After all, they’re not the kind of thing that’s very pretty. But maybe we should talk about them and give them a bit of an airing out.
The clear visibility of stats of all kinds on WordPress makes perfect fodder for insecurity; you can’t avoid them if you try. Early on in my blogging journey, I decided I didn’t want to get caught up in stats, so I rarely checked my stats page. That’s still the case. But there are so many other places where stats will jump up and slap you in the face.
If you’re reading posts in the WordPress Reader, you can immediately see how many followers the person has and how many likes they have on a post. You don’t want to look at it? Too bad, so sad. As soon as you go to click the like button, boom, you have to see who else has liked that post. It wasn’t always that way; you used to have to put a little bit of effort to see all the likers. I hated that change when it happened, and I still do.
So, what might people have blogging insecurities about?
There are multiple areas that can be potential triggers for insecurity and comparison to others. The particular mix for a given blogger will likely depend on their personality, where their blog is at in its evolution, and what their blogging goals are.
Blog quality
I think a common one is to doubt the quality of one’s own blog, whether it’s the ideas or the style of writing. Sometimes bloggers will say that they’re not sure why people would want to read their blog. There isn’t some objective standard for what makes a good blog, so there’s the risk of letting shoulds take over, telling you that your blog should be something other than what it is.
This is one area that hasn’t been an issue for me at any point in my blogging journey, at least as far as I recall. I’m content with my blog, and that’s good enough for me. Plus I have no interest in changing what I write about or how I write.
Follower numbers
It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that follower numbers are a reflection of blog quality. From what I’ve seen, that’s not true at all. Some people, by a combination of luck and strategy, manage to grow quickly right from the start. For other bloggers, it’s a slow process. Once you research a certain follow threshold, things start to take off and followers start randomly showing up. A big chunk of those followers will be spammy. But there are many factors that influence blog growth, and quality is only a small one.
Just because a blogger has a large number of followers doesn’t mean they don’t have insecurities; there are plenty of other things to feel insecure about. I’m quite content with my follower numbers; my insecurities lie elsewhere.
Reader engagement
Views, likes, and comments are all areas to potentially feel lousy about. The particular mix of inadequacy will likely depend somewhat on what stage of growth your blog is at. For newer blogs, it might be a lack of comments that’s a trigger. But even for larger blogs, there’s room to feel insecure, especially if you start comparing your blog to other blogs. Comparisons will manage to bite you in the butt every time if given the opportunity. While you can’t compare views, likes and comments are right there in your face.
One thing that’s been bugging me lately is the ratio of likes to views. It’s normal for only a fraction of the people who look at your posts to click the like button. Lately, I feel like that ratio has been dropping on my blog, and for most posts, it’s less than 1/3 of viewers who click like, or sometimes closer to 1/4. I think part of what bugs me is that I can’t explain it; I have no way of knowing what’s going on for that 70% of people who look but don’t click like, and there’s no possibility of finding out.
Who’s not reading your blog
There are many reasons that people can stop reading your blog. One of the common ones is that people are taking a blogging hiatus. But sometimes, you can see that some of these bloggers are still around. So what’s the deal? One of WordPress’s glitches that pops up every once in a while is that it will randomly unfollow people. If WordPress has randomly caused Blogger X to unfollow me, Blogger X doesn’t realize that unless they happen to notice that they haven’t seen posts from me for a while. It’s awkward, because there’s no way of knowing if it was a WordPress glitch or Blogger X just decided to stop reading.
Because WordPress shoves it in your face who’s liking people’s posts, you can’t really help but see who’s reading other people’s posts but not yours. I get sucked into that trap sometimes, yet it was never an issue back when you had to put that tiny bit of effort into finding out who liked a post. Damn you, WP!
Something that’s come up repeatedly for me over time is that a lot of the mental health blogs that I’ve read regularly never read mine, or at least as far as I could tell. I certainly don’t expect that every blog I read should read mine, but when it’s in the same niche and there’s no return engagement at all it feels a bit weird. This tends to ebb and flow over time in terms of whether it’s nagging at me or not, and it’s more likely to come up during phases when a lot of my readers are non-mental health bloggers. I used to be reluctant to unfollow mental health blogs, but then I figured if it was going to bug me, then I’d be better off unfollowing.
Feeling impressed by other bloggers
It can be easy to compare what someone else is doing to what we’re doing, and frame it all within our own context. But it doesn’t work that way; we all have different skills and things we struggle with. While you’re feeling impressed by one aspect of someone else’s blog, they may be thinking there’s no way they could manage to pull off what you’re doing on your blog.
I’m guessing that most of us have an “easy” type of post. By easy, I mean the kind of thing you can get into a groove with, and cranking out that kind of post is relatively low effort. My easy and your easy may be entirely different; your easy might be my difficult, and vice versa. And what someone easy is may not be obvious.
Whether you share art, music, poetry, your thoughts, what happened in your day, or anything else, there’s most likely another blogger out there thinking damn, I wouldn’t be able to manage that with my blog. Some people have a hard time publishing once a week, while others have a hard time keeping it under five a day. Different things are easy and hard for each of us.
Another key thing to keep in mind is that people have vastly different amounts of time to spend on their blog, depending on what’s going on in the rest of their life. Someone with a partner, five kids, and three animals, plus a full-time job, is going to have a lot less time for blogging me, who has nothing else to fit into the day but some guinea pig cuddles.
What to do about it?
For me, the most important thing is to just keep bringing it back to purpose. I suspect that, at least for most of us, the purpose isn’t about stats or comparisons. It’s about something greater that we get out of it, whether that’s the therapeutic value of writing, a sense of community, or whatever else. When my own securities start nagging at me, it often has to do with inadvertently getting side-tracked from my purpose, and I need a bit of a course correction.
It can also be helpful to try to focus on what you do have with your blog, such as readers whom you regularly interact with. Because the people you do interact with will always be far more important than the people that don’t.
I think it’s also useful to recognize that you’ll never be the only one having blog-related insecurities. It’s part and parcel of the blogging experience, even if no one feels comfortable talking about it. But I think talking about it can help; I know my little niggles have settled down simply after writing this post.
Do you have any blogging insecurities that you’d like to share?
The blogging toolbox series has tips to support you in your blogging journey. It includes these posts:
I don’t have enough blogging insecurities. But I am curious about stats; it’s fun to see that people from all over read your posts. I treat my blog more like a diary that people might want to peek at. LOL
That’s good! Yeah, it’s cool to see the different countries that readers come from.
I’m not trying to get a million followers but it is nice to know I’m interesting enough to be read and liked by some people. I am fascinated by the stats. I’m not sure why. I also like to see the countries people come from. I find they are not always accurate. Sometimes I get zero views but I still get likes. I can’t figure that one out. It’s easier to notice because I have few followers. One thing I don’t like is getting followed by spam accounts. I would rather have someone I can follow back.
Getting followed by spam accounts is pretty hard to avoid. A few of them I’ve removed from followers list but they kept refollowing, so I gave up trying.
The likes without views probably happens because someone is browsing through a tag in the WP Reader and liking a bunch of posts straight from there without reading them.
Since I am relatively new to blogging I tend to look at my stats as a measure of how I am doing. These stats go in phases. If they aren’t keeping up with themselves, I tend to think I am not writing what people want to hear. So there is that tension of writing what I feel versus writing what people want to hear.
Yeah that balance can be hard to figure out.
I love blogging and the supportive community here. My insecurity is more about why don’t my real life friends take any interest? It bugs me sometimes that they’d rather hang on stupid FB and argue politics than read my writing…
I can imagine.
Thank you for sharing this great information
🙂 I have been blogging since 2009; it all started on Blogger.
When one has been blogging as long as I have, blogging insecurities tend to melt away.
Where quality is concerned, I will always be a stickler for it.
One minor concern that I have is that I cannot get my blog to look exactly the way that I want with the free WordPress plan.
When I was on Blogger, I had the freedom to upload a different-looking blogging theme (which was one that Blogger did not provide) and I was able to use any type of fonts and any type of commenting system; back then, my commenting system of choice was Disqus.
On a positive note, engagement on WordPress surpasses that on Blogger (And that is mainly because of the WordPress Reader).
Yes, the WordPress Reader, despite its assorted faults, really adds a great deal to the blogging experience.
Some really good points. A lot comes down to comparisons, doesn’t it? Like comparing what we think of our content quality against another blog, how we think others are doing in terms of reader engagement, the number of followers we have versus what other blogs have. It’s a dangerous game. With the ratio of people reading versus liking, could some of it be that not everyone has a WP account? Ie. you could have plenty of readers that are just out there taking a read, who don’t blog themselves. They don’t want to sign up or leave details and they don’t engage with the WP tools like the button for that reason. Maybe some percentage falls into that category?xx
That’s possible. Search engine traffic tends to go to posts that have been around for a while, but maybe Pinterest traffic is making a difference for recent posts.
I don’t know. Just that my delusions and hallucinations, make it difficult to post sometimes. I don’t know if that qualifies. Either way, I’m still here!
And that’s what matters!
Thank you
I used to pay a lot more attention to the stats than I do now. Comparison is an easy game, but I just don’t have the energy to keep up with it. I’m content with the small community of people I’ve come to chat with and that’s enough. My insecurity is always about not being able to keep up with everyone else; I want to be that person that reads everything but I honestly just get so overwhelmed. That keeps me from writing too sometimes. I’m working on this but it’s definitely a struggle I keep coming up against.
Reading takes time, energy, and focus that aren’t always available. I’m always glad to see a post from you whenever you write.
I have some insecurities, definitely. I mostly just write about my daily life, like a journal. I sometimes worry about what others might think of me, or if they think my words are worthless. I try to avoid looking at the stats – it helps my sanity. And you’re right about the stats being thrown in your face.
I agree that what matters most is the people we regularly interact with, that’s what makes connecting through writing special.
Overall I just try and write whatever I want, and try not to care if someone doesn’t care.
I am with you my insecurity is my perception and avoid looking at stats. And the friends I’ve made etc.
Definitely. I try to focus on the positives like meeting new friends and interacting with others in a meaningful way.
Yeah, there’s really good stuff there.
Yeah, it’s nice that there’s some really strong positives to help with challenging the insecurities.
I think realistically, no matter what we write and how well we write it, some people aren’t going to be interested, so trying to write for them is a waste of time.
I totally agree
Since my many blogs through these many, many years have just been sort of an on-line journal I don’t give a whit about stats, followers etc. LOL I am more afraid of people FINDING me than people not finding me – I suppose it is different for people who blog for a specific purpose – for me it’s just a brain-dump.
That sounds like a very good approach.
Well, I am Really Really new to blogging so I just want to thank you for this post, I got to know how everything works and also what others think while blogging.
Thank you.
I’m glad it was helpful!
My insecurity with blogging is that when I hit “publish” I then wonder did I word it correctly. Could I have maybe added more thought? Everything like those things always plagues me after a post goes “live”.
When I hit publish, I tend to wonder if there was something that I forgot to do or if there was something that needed fixing. For some reason, though, when I click schedule, I don’t think about that at all.
Based on my current blog I write, I have no insecurities. But this I feel is because of how many years I have been blogging before creating this blog.
Creating this blog was for theraputic reasons, as my old blog and when I found it helped other people not feel alone, then that was an added bonus. A reason to carry on, as well as carry on for my theraputic journey and release what sometimes was my crap.
But also, the lovely supportive community here. Something I have said many times before.
Only time I have held myself back with writing and it took time to raise it in a blog and that was a small discussion of rape.
I wanted to raise it a little for some time before than I did.
There is only one topic I won’t raise on my blog, for the fear of heavy bitching. So obviously, I can’t say what that is. I know I would get a lot of support and understanding, but I may get also heaviness I don’t want. Another blogger has said they had when they discussed same topic. So not something I would raise on something so personal to me, that I won’t have done. I had raised it in conversation on another blog, or two. But to put it down in my own blog post, I just can’t.
The talking of me feeling suicidal last year, now that was a very hard one to admit on my blog.
Even though I knew I have plenty of supporting fellow bloggers and readers and no fear of the topic. It was just raising it that was. I know I didn’t want to upset my close friends hearing how I felt, even though I told them personally first, before mentioning it on my blog.
I know what you mean about wanting to avoid the heaviness. Sometimes the downsides of writing about something outweigh the upsides.
Suicide is hard to talk about. I’m fine with talking about it in the past tense, but in the present tense it’s harder. I don’t want people to worry because of what I say, because it’s it’s not useful for them and it’s not helpful for me either.
I’m a new blogger and my biggest insecurity right now is stats. I was so excited to start my blog and have people be engaged. I wanted it to take off right away. I have to train myself to stop looking at the stats.
Yeah, it can be hard. But what I’ve seen, for the vast majority of bloggers, it takes a while before things start to pick up.