Blog Day Today: What Real Bloggers Never Tell the World Truth about

Today the entire online world is supposed to celebrate the blog day – the holiday that is celebrated on August 31 every year. For the first time the day was celebrated in 2005 and it falls on the last day of summer because binary inscription of the word “blog” is exactly 3108 (at least according to the sources I’ve found). So today is the 5^th blog day which is probably the sign of some maturity and yet another reason to celebrate.

Of course the entire blogosphere has changed dramatically since its early days and it will take you a long time to still manage to find some of the original personal journals full of naïve ramblings and rants while the so-called professional blogs are easily found and seem to be everywhere as their teams work hard on SEO, promotion and everything in between that makes a professional blog what it actually is intended to be: a money-making machine for its founders.

I myself have been blogging for the last 3 years myself professionally here on Profy and also running some corporate blogs for my customers. The strangest thing of all is that I’ve never actually managed to get myself a more personal blog that could still resemble something of the online diary a blog was initially made to be. So I don’t really count myself to be a 100% of a professional blogger as I only earn part of my revenue blogging – other sources include consulting (the most standard way for tech bloggers to make real money), social media marketing and even translation and localization services as well.

And since I am not really a professional full-time blogger but still happen to know the industry after working in it for 3 years, I wanted to share with you some things that no real blogger will ever tell you the truth about. At that I want to tell you in advance that I am not going to tell you the truth about such things myself – this is nothing but a list as if I ever decide to tell the truth out in the open about any of the things from the list, I may be forever banned from the blogging community. And this is not really the purpose of this post. So no real blogger will ever tell you the truth about:

How much a blogger makes blogging

The problem is that the vast majority of blogs only make tiny amounts that could never feed the blogger and his or her family. But at the same time there’s a strong tradition in the online world of keeping everyone around the blogosphere believe that we all make some huge amounts off advertising and all the accompanying services. And it looks like there’s a huge conspiracy theory around the blogosphere that does not allow bloggers share their real revenue figures – so we are all stuck with tons of mysteries here.

How much it is to get to Digg homepage

Unfortunately by the time when I arrived to the blogosphere, it had already become virtually impossible to get to the home page of services like Digg and the others without any specific efforts that are entirely against the ToS of all such services. There are always some tricks required to get there and they usually involve working with the top diggers (submitters or whatever they are called elsewhere) and compensating their efforts in some form – frequently with a monetary compensation as well. But getting to know the people you need to pay to get to the top and also knowing how to offer them money for their services, is another huge mystery as if everyone in the blogosphere knew who and how to pay, everyone would have been able to get to the Digg home page and there would have been no intrigue any more at all – and the blogosphere can’t live without intrigues.

The real reason for blogging

Bloggers will usually claim that they blog for all kinds of reasons, including willingness to share their unique knowledge and experience with the world or hoping to make the world a better place. But I’ve been working in the blogosphere long enough to know that only a very small percentage of bloggers actually have some big reasons for blogging while the vast majority only blog hoping to get money, fame or some professional recognition – and more money eventually. I don’t like the fact that I’ve lost my idealism months ago and I’d really want to believe all the bloggers that claim they only want to do good but my experience shows I only know a couple of people who actually want to do good and do something good instead of only claiming so – out of hundreds of bloggers I’ve met.

Why bloggers link to other bloggers

This is the most intriguing question of all. All the emerging bloggers quickly learn that linking to other blogs is a huge play in the blogosphere because this is how you are supposed to get your own traffic and recognition from other bloggers. And of course the novice bloggers all begin with linking to the A-listers hoping that one day they will get a link back and will be drowned in traffic and new subscribers. But the problem is that while for the novice bloggers linking is a very simple act of finding the most well-known source for some information and linking to it, any experienced blogger has a variety of reasons for linking to other bloggers, including personal friendships, getting links in the past, knowing the name of the blogger or meeting personally and what not. There may even be monetary issues involved for the blogs that belong to the same ad networks but these are rare. But no matter how many reasons a blogger may have to link to this particular post of this particular blog, chances are you will never get to know the truth as we invariably claim that we only think about trustworthiness of our sources and basically nothing else.

So here is my list of things bloggers will never tell you the truth about and while I don’t think it is a complete one, if you have a real-life friend who is a professional blogger, don’t forget to send him or her a card today – as blog day should probably be a big day for any blogger – and ask at least some of these questions. Who knows, what if a real friend decides to share real truth, after all?

Photo credit: Wesley Fryer via Flickr