Losing Sight Of The Objective?

When I first started blogging, all I wanted was an outlet for me to express myself and to write about my 3 passions in life — my kids, travel and photography.

As time went by, I thought to myself, if I can make some money along the way, why not? After all, a lot of people do the same thing themselves. So some 2 weeks ago, I signed up with several sites that pay bloggers to write posts on specific subjects.

Now I find the whole blogging-for-money thing is making me way too concerned about my stats because better stats = better ranking = better paid blogging opportunities. As a result, I find myself obsessively checking my stats as often as I can. Worse still, I find myself writing about subjects that are beyond the usual scope of my blog but which I know will be picked up by the search engines and will bring in a lot of traffic into my site. But then I got to thinking — even if people do wander into my site due to some controversial post that I write about, if they’re not into the subjects that I normally write about, eventually they probably won’t come back, thereby rendering the entire exercise pointless. [Note: Those posts are still ‘Drafts’ and I’ve been fighting the urge to publish them.]

Am I losing sight of my original objective when I started first blogging? Is it worth inserting off-topic stuff like incontinent products and a diet pill that works into my posts in exchange for some monetary gain? Sure, it takes some imagination and creativity to come up with posts relevant to my blog which include the obligatory links. But how will it affect the overall quality of my blog in the long run?

Sheesh… it’s just a blog. So why am I so obsessed about the whole thing?