Is passion a key to a successful blog?

What is the single most important element to create a successful blog?

If you search through the Net, you will find that most people come with a similar answer: PASSION.

You should blog on something you really LOVE, blog on something you really have PASSION about, because it is that LOVE and PASSION which will carry you through all the dull and dumb moments in your life when you do blogging.

That's what they say. For a long time I can't agree more.

However, is it true?

Recently I came to realise: Yes and No.
It depends on what you mean by a SUCCESSFUL BLOG, how you use PASSION in blogging, and whether you have a good STRATEGY.

Passion is absolutely important, however, only when you know what a SUCCESSFUL BLOG means to you, knowing what you WANT from your blog, and making a good STRATEGY to achieve it, you will be able to channel your passion to the right direction and drive your blog to success.

Define a successful blog

What does a successful blog means to you?

A blog that drives traffic?
A blog for networking with like-minded folks?
A blog that becomes a showcase of your expertise?
A blog that brings more visibility to your business?
Or a blog that IS itself a business, which directly generates money for you, even generates enough income to support your dream lifestyle? (just like our dream plan, to live by traveling and blogging...)

You need to ask yourself this crucial question, otherwise soon you will be confused about why you are spending all the energy and time to do what you are doing now.

Also to be aware: your definition of a successful blog might be changing from time to time, depending on the development of your blog, your career, your business, and the course of your life, your dream, and your ways of thinking.

So, refresh your thoughts on this regularly.

For example, I used to think that a successful blog is a blog that gains reputation, loved by regular readers, enables good interactions, generates traffics, showcases the know-how of the owner. In other words, as a good marketing channels for my business, which is writing.

No doubt, what behind my successful blog is my passion for writing. I love writing, so I created a lot of "Pillar articles", which keep driving traffics to my blog. Gradually my blog become one of the top Chinese blogs in its own niche, has a group of raving fans (or to put it modestly, which suits me better: a group of loyal readers).

Through my blog many people got to know me. They invited me for writing columns, writing books. In a way my passion has met my blogging purpose. In every aspect I could consider my blog as a successful blog. However, I start to realise that while passion can be a good head start to create solid contents and drive traffic, it is definitely not enough to maintain a growing successful blog.

I say so for two reasons.
First, my blog starts to take money out of my pocket.
Second, no matter how much passions I have, it can still run out from time to time.

Passion v.s Strategy

While my blog keep being more and more popular, getting more and more traffic and subscribers, it also literally starts to lose money . I haven't been able to generate enough advertisement income from my free writing on the blog, therefore I ended up paying more and more to maintain the visibilities of my free content.

For many month in a row my bandwidth was exceeded by the growing traffic, which made me write literally the same email in the end of EVERY month to my web host: "more bandwidth needed, please."

Besides, I have lost the passions of writings for quite sometime due to my personal life changes and busy working days. My current traffic are mostly driven by those old solid articles and growing numbers of readers through referrers.

I started to realise, passion is not enough to maintain my successful blog. I need solid strategy, a strategy that keeps me going and a monetary plan that maintains the financial healthiness of my blog. It is no longer a question of whether I want to get rich by blogging, but a question of whether I want to get poorer and poorer for the sake of having a successful blog that drives lots of traffic.

I do have Google Adsense activated in my blog, however it doesn't do well in the conversion rates, which is due to my lack of monetizing strategy. So far it still can generate enough income to cover my web host fees, however if my blog continues to grow popularity in the current speed, soon it won't be able to maintain itself in monetary terms.

Let's look at another case: my husband -Jarkko's blogs.

Jarkko is the other co-writer in this Plan Dream blog. He has been telling you his funny blogging experiments. He obviously has given most updated news to his imagined readers than to his wife -me. As I only learned that he was CAUGHT BY GOOGLE from his previous blog entry, even though he practically sat next to me all day long. ;-)

Well, back to the topic.

Jarkko has been blogging from 2004 just like me. While I have been so dedicated to my passion for writing as a blogger, he has a totally different strategy.

He created several blogs in different topics, ranging from stripe comics, astrology advice, travel tips in Taiwan, to mobile phone industry review and his real passion: Log Home Cabins.

Is he interested in all the topics? More or less I guess, otherwise he wouldn't have been creating them. However, what made him different from me is that he has a clear strategy, he has a plan, he doesn't just write for the sake of writing. He doesn't have the passion for writing but he has the passions for blogging and smart enough to make strategic choice.

Although during the past 1-2 years he hasn't been updating those blogs very often due to his busy day jobs, his Google Adsense conversion rates is 10 times higher than mine (a recent shock to me).

In other words, we both do blogging with passions, only I work more to lose money and he work less to gain money.

See the difference? it is not PASSION, it is STRATEGY. I use passion for just writing, he uses passion for creating strategy in his blogging.

After comparing our experience it is clear that although passion is one of the most important elements to keep you going, it is NOT enough for growing a successful blog. No matter what you mean by successful blog, eventually you will realise that you need clear plan, strategy, even monetary strategy to grow, develop and maintain your successful blog.

A successful blog needs passion AND plan, a goal for the future, a strategy to make it happen and make sure that you don't lose more and more money just for you passion, to show the direction for you to maintain and motivate your passions even when you are at low moments without much passions in your mind.

Having all these said and acknowledged, now it's time to get back to my successful "poor" blog, to congratulate myself the high traffic and to dedicates my thoughts to find solutions of "low profit". Only in this way, my successful blog can continue to grow my business, even being a business itself.

Yes that's what I am going to do now.

How about you?

Until the next time.

May 4 Updates:
This article is chosen as one of the entries of Carnival of Business and Entrepreneurship #19 along with other 20 posts. I am content. :)