As I travel around the blogosphere, I’ve come across numerous tips and advice on how to successfully blog and develop a strong readership. Some of it involves developing a community of friends on social networks that could potentially bring an onslaught of massive traffic to your site. This can be done once you establish a mini-network of friends who can collectively Digg, Stumble or Reddit your blogging content, with you of course agreeing to do the same for them in return (sort of a you scratch my back, I’ll shave yours arrangement).

Some people can be really good at this for whatever reason. Me on the other hand… I can’t make friends in real life, I’m supposed to do it on here? My ass. I begged just ONE acquaintance of mine to stumble my blog so I could get a boost in traffic and of course I got blown off. Obviously this isn’t going to be a winning strategy for me right now. Ahhhhh, if only I were a hot babe, how easier this would all be…..

But anyway…

A few of the blogging experts I’ve encountered also recommended getting an outside web designer to develop the look of your blog for you (and also assist in optimizing it for search engines). Look, I don’t want no designer touching my private goomie gammies, capice? The thought of a third party having access to my code like that just doesn’t give me any warm and fuzzy thoughts, ya know?

But I can understand the rationale behind it. Blogging, or rather, professional blogging is HARD work. You’re basically doing the work of three people largely because it’s a three pronged process: promotion, maintenance and content building, all of which can be full time jobs unto themselves. And because I spent so much time on the former two for the past couple of weeks, I left myself little time for the latter.

Obviously, that will have to change as I try to find a way to balance these three aspects to blogging. But now I’m sorely tempted to just say “You know what? Screw it, it’s time I started BLOGGING, PERIOD.” It doesn’t matter that I still don’t really know who I am as a person, much less what the hell my niche should be. I think I need to just get up and go, and let the words flo’. Maybe this way I’ll somehow be able to create something coherent and interesting enough to attract a readership larger than the 5 people who regularly visit the NPR website.