The Ideal Blog

There is no ideal blog, let us face that plain truth. There are over 600 million blogs in the world today, out of over 1.9 billion websites. More than 3 billion blog posts are published each year worldwide. Almost 6000 blog posts are published each minute. And these posts deal with topics like How to make coconut chutney and What to pack if you are travelling to Timbuktu. People blog about food, travel, fashion, movies, photography, and what not. People like me blog about almost everything under the sun. Yes, there is politics in my blog and there is philosophy. There is fiction and there is provocation. Some of my most popular posts are rather mediocre stuff written for students. What I consider my best writing has invariably got poor readership.

My presently active blog is about a decade old. It has clocked over a million views so far with the graph showing very encouraging slopes. Let me speak here from my personal experience and not as an expert on anything, least of all blogging.

First and foremost, I don’t write blog posts for money. That matters. Mine is a personal blog that I maintain for the sheer pleasure of writing. That is why I don’t have what ‘successful’ bloggers call a ‘niche’. But I write consistently and regularly. I have very strong views and convictions about a lot of things and they do make their presence felt, sometimes painfully so, in my posts. My readers know that too. They come to my blog expecting certain bluntness and audacity. That blunt audacity is my ‘niche’ perhaps. That audacity amuses many readers, it provokes some, and it hurts a few.

Even if I wish to mellow that audacity, I can’t. That’s the simple truth. Because that audacity runs in my veins. That audacity lies in the marrow of my bones. In other words, my writing emerges primarily from my heart. There is authenticity in my writing. That is another quality required of any ‘successful’ writer.

Never compromise on quality. That is very important. Even if you’re writing about how bored you are, make it interesting for the reader by providing something to ponder on. Ensure that your style suits your topic. Bring in something new, something that the readers haven’t heard yet about boredom. You may be forced to make a choice between boredom and suffering, but enable your reader to discover her genius that lies dormant beneath the veneer of her boredom. Yes, you the writer have to suffer in order to bring quality to your reader. Writing is not for lethargic people.

Your blog must have a personality. It comes naturally if you are authentic. If you are trying to be diplomatic where your readers expect accuracy, there is no chance for you to succeed. We live in a world of diplomacies of all sorts. They call it post-truth world. Nevertheless, the yearning for truth lies at the bottom of every heart. No blogger can afford to ignore that in the long run.

Finally, even a personal blogger has to remember one thing: the moment you decide to make your writing public it ceases to be personal. Any discourse, even your most personal diary entry, that is put up in a public space becomes a public discourse that is open to discussion, debate and criticism. You have the right to say what you believe is true and the others have an equal right to cut your truth into pieces. Your writing is not personal once you put it up for the public to read.