Now Reading ...From my 5 months experience in blogging, I have faced several unpleasant experiences that happen to make me lose the taste of blogging. I become less confidence every time those distractions and mental interruptors around me.
I labeled those distraction as “Confidence Corruptor”. It will absolutely corrupting your self-motivation and confidence and make you feel bad all the day.
With this post, I hope you will be aware of the mental interruption that may happen to you and make a quick correction to it before it start corrupting your inner self.
Corruptor 1: Statistic
It’s been a habit for all web master and blogger to track their web/blog everyday to track their marketing efforts. But it’s not recommended to do it everyday for beginner who just step in the first month online. If you are a beginner, make sure to check your statistic not more than 4 times a month.
More than that will mean nothing but a mental distortion and will corrupting your self-confidence. The statistic I refer to is spreading from:
- Bbog Visitor
- PR
- Alexa
- Feed Subscriber
- Adsense
- Technorati
- etc.
Everything is build slowly. Although you are trying to boost your traffic rank with several social bookmarking services, the traffic spike will go down for the next day and everything is calm again.
Except your have read Darren’s post and make a good use of it by entering to the front page of Each social bookmarking regularly!
Installing Adsense Notifier (Plugin for hourly tracking of your adsense earning for firefox browser) is not a good idea for beginner too! Always seeing the “0″ (zero) earning every will surely corrupting your self-confidence.
Corruptor 2: Negative Comments
It’s been a culture for blogger to receive a regular negative comments. It’s good, actually. But our ego won’t hold it for long. There will be an eruption of emotion if we just treasure it in our heart.
Negative comment will sometimes ‘very negative’ which succeed to breaking our self-confidence barrier and make you unstable. Before that happen, It’s wise for you to learn sufficient tips to handle those comments.
Below is the excellent tips for handling negative comment to prevent your inner collapse:
- Mean Spirited comments and blogging
- Negative Blog Comments - Keep You Focus
- How to Deal with Negative Comments
Corruptor 3: Time Limitation
I have been continuously feeling down because of the limitation of time lately. Even I had scheduled everything up, I still feeling not enough and want more time.
May be this is the common problem the everybody should face. God only provide us 24 hours a day and no compromise to add more 2 or 3 hours. Well, we can’t have a trading with God, can we?
“So many things to do, so little time”. This is the sentence that I heard and read a lot at the comments of some high demanding blogger , I also realized that I spoke this sentence more often since the blog is growing!
With so many project to work on, and with the full time job that kill half of my day, I can say that my self-confidence is not as large as before…
Whenever I feel the time limitation, my confidence is decrease to a certain state that make me feel bad for the entire day.
Make sure to follow any newest tips in time management. It is crucial for your future life expanding. Don’t get stuck with the little time and keep thinking on the limitation.
Corruptor 4: Blank Comment Section
You have try your best, you have tweak your content for 2 days. finally, you feel good about the draft post, and you decide to publish it and try to rock the world.
Unfortunately, your content is not respond well. 1 day passed, 2 days passed… No comment at all, although you have 500 subscribers.
3 days passed… no comment. Nobody respond. At this rate, normal human will begin to blame on their live and the unresponsive reader. Or may be you have begin to lose your mood and start to feel discourage and not confident to produce more content.
Zero comment Support from the reader is the biggest headache for every blogger. You will feel rotten and lose your confident when you see a strike Zero between post to post.
What make blogosphere alive is the two ways communication. If your post is not respond well, high possibility that your writing is not in the interest of your reader.
Or you can try to generate more comments by using some useful plugin for wordpress. JohnTP have a good post about top 5 wordpress Plugin that help increase comments. Try to use it to see if your can rise your confidence a bit.
Corruptor 5: Health
Not everybody could work like hell and stay up late to concentrate and set thing up. Health will become the most serious problem when you works too hard on your project.
Bad health will become your confidence corruptor if you don’t care about it. When you sick, everything is not stop moving and wait for you to recover. The net will keep going with the fastest pace as it usually have.
By lying at the bed and cannot do anything because of the sickness, you will regret at what you have done to your body and the abandon project that still need a lot of things to work at.
Make sure to exercise properly, not brain exercise and finger pinching at the keyboard exercise, but doing some yoga or taichi, or may aerobic and Jogging. Those activity really help a lot to avoid Confidence Corruption because of bad Health.
Any comments, Advise, Suggestions? I invite you to share us your idea below.
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(August 23, 2007, 4:34 am)
You know, I’ve been “blogging” since 1994 and I’ve had each of these. They don’t go away with time. Just a few weeks ago, a batch of negative comments brought shadows to my blogging experience. My only saving grace was that I had “been there, done that” and knew it would pass.
You’ve done a great job spelling out some of the biggest things that get in the way of blogging. The only obvious one that I can find is having your content scraped, stolen, and used without permission. That sucks away a lot of the joy of blogging, turning from shock, to anger, to resentment, and often to uselessness, even though there is plenty you can do to stop them. It just feels overwhelming and impossible to fight against.
Thanks for helping to remind us that blogging isn’t easy, and that it is work, but faith, determination, and confidence in our abilities will pull us through.
Reply to Lorelle(August 23, 2007, 6:07 am)
Hi, Lorelle. Thanks taking the time to visit and commenting at my Blog.
It’s amazing that to know that a blogger who have 13 years of blogging experiences still facing those annoying problems. It make my troubles looks small!
I’m happy that you are willing to share me your story, Lorelle.
Reply to Ken XuI will prepare myself for the next wave of attacks and hope I would going through it smoothly.
I believe, the point you carried out is the other “corruptor” that I must face in the future.
(August 23, 2007, 2:05 pm)
Extraordinary article Ken. I guess you have predicted my situation right. This article has given me more confidence. And congrats on getting Madam Lorelle to comment on your blog.
Reply to Ram karthik(August 24, 2007, 12:03 am)
Thanks, Ramkarthik! It is my biggest morale support to do better in the future.
Reply to Ken XuHope we can do confidence together, since the distraction is going the follow us all the way, we have to think it as our friend.
(August 23, 2007, 11:55 pm)
this is a very nice post Ken…
I never installed that firefox plugin and I do not check my adsense at all
As a matter of fact, after I moved to wordpress late June, I never even logged in adsense account and when I did two days ago, I was surprised to see they offer so many referral products now lol
So, not checking for long periods of time isn’t good either…
you have provided very nice list of links there and I am going to bookmark this post!
Reply to PearlIts nice you got Lorelle commenting here, that would be a morale booster in itself for me
(August 25, 2007, 4:40 am)
lol. I think you should check regularly but less frequency. 1 week once is reasonable. more than that will only wasting your time.
Reply to Ken XuLorelle willing to comment here is my greatest joy for this week. Just like the joy you felt when Darren Rowse Subscribe to your feed!
I’m so motivated and will pour all of the energy to the upcoming posts.
(August 24, 2007, 9:32 am)
Absolutely true, Ken. I don’t want to wait for your another niche posts. Keep it up posting.
Reply to Myo Kyaw Htun(August 25, 2007, 4:44 am)
Hi, Kyaw Htun. I will keep posting. It’s my hobby actually.
Reply to Ken Xu(August 25, 2007, 3:12 am)
Thanks for another insightful post! I made a comment last night to your ‘3 classic questions…’ saying that i’ve cited you in the post i’ve submitted to problogger, but am not sure if you have read it.
Reply to proud mom(August 25, 2007, 4:33 am)
Hi again, Proud Mom!
I have some downtime with the email system from my server. I’m sorry for the late reply.
Thanks for commenting. Try to visit Lorelle’s post for in depth discussion about this topic in this post.
Have a nice day!
Reply to Ken Xu(August 25, 2007, 11:38 am)
I’m not blogging myself, but I think that it’s funny how your 5 ‘confidence corruptors’ are also applicable to other non-internet tasks. Statistics and negative or no comments would be measurable success and external confirmation outside the net context, while time limitation and health relate to perfectionism that you exhibit at some task. I guess blogging is just like life, only with more spam.
Reply to Michael Repplinger(August 25, 2007, 12:00 pm)
Hi, Michael. Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
I’m agree with you. The net (online) will not vary much with the offline or conventional business system.
If you are excel in your offline world, with a little tweak and understanding, you can apply all your offline skills to blogging and be the next pro-blogger like Lorelle and Darren Rowse.
Reply to Ken Xu