I sure like to blog. But guess what? My blog traffic has flatlined. The number of daily/monthly visitors has gone off since February. For someone whose best trait is “versatility,” this is troublesome. My thoughts turn to, What am I doing wrong?

The truth is that I like starting things. Like getting into Girl Scouts when I was a kid. I started it. But I quit early. Too much participation. And I like growing things. I love to see things get bigger and better. But that leads to the problem here. I don’t like sustaining things. It’s just how I am cabled. If the figures aren’t going in an upward curve I get disappointed and can lose interest.

Plainly this has made me examine why I am blogging.

In the past I have posted, that I blog for five reasons:

1. To raise my books’ visibility
2. To elucidate on my writing vision
3. To make relationships with people 
4. To be alert to trends and topics I am interested in
5. To mentor the latest group of aspiring writers

But, the more I think about this, I realize these are really perks of blogging, not necessarily reasons for doing it.

I blog so that I can examine my thinking and develop my best ideas. In short, I blog for myself. (But I’m glad you are here!)

In truth, it shouldn’t make any difference whether I have ten readers or 10,000. If I’m writing, I’m thinking about my life, my work, and what matters most. That’s good enough. And more than some people have.

Occasionally , I get tired and think about giving up blogging altogether. But to do so would be to give in to laziness. So I usually double down on my efforts. Re-designing my blogging goals re-energizes me. Sometimes re-designing my entire blog.

So, for now, I’m going to quit looking at my blog stats and just write. If I do that regularly, I’ll achieve my goal, whether or not my traffic is growing.