5 Struggles Only Bloggers Can Understand

Blogging is hard. It’s practically designed to pull up every possible insecurity and neurotic tendency from deep inside you every time you compose a sentence. It has struggles that you can only understand if you are part of the keyboard hustle. Here are some of them

Low hits when you thought you had a hot story

Sometimes you feel inspired and full of ideas so you sit down, shut out the rest of the world and pen a great story. In your mind, you are thinking, “This is going to be my magnum opus. Watu watanitambua round hii”. You feel that the story will really go viral, leaving readers in awe. Then you post it and go about your business. Shock unto you when you check on the hits a few hours later. Not even a single person has shared it. The number of people who have read your article are fewer than the number of schools that have been burnt. That’s when you start wondering why the universe is so cruel, All that effort for nothing? Punch me please.

Trolls

As a blogger, you also have to face the self-proclaimed critics. They will tear your article to shreds and post all kinds of negative opinions. They post a deliberately provocative comment with the intention of causing maximum harm and hurting your feelings. Some even share your article on Facebook with a lengthy negative caption. These kind of people are a blogger’s worst enemy. “They don’t want you to win….They don’t want you to be the best” [insert Dj Khaleed voice]. The good thing is that some of us have nerves of steel. I personally have been trolled more times than I can remember. But I never care. I never take the war to them. I never will

Annoying questions from people who think blogging IS NOT A CAREER

Once in a while, someone will ask you this question, “Apart from blogging, what else do you do?” It’s the most annoying query that will ever be plastered on your face by people in traditional careers like law, accounts etc. People don’t understand that blogging is a job that actually pays well. It’s like asking a surgeon, “Apart from saving people’s lives at the operating table, what else do you do?” So this is a warning to everyone who knows me. If you ever ask me this question, expect a punch to and firmly on your jaw and disconnect at least two of your teeth from your gums. Okay? Na sitarudia

Someone copy-pasting your work and not giving you credit

We here at Ghafla get frustrated by this a lot. There are some adsense reliant bloggers who just sit in their bed sitter kejas and copy-paste Ghafla articles order to give their blogs more traffic. Even when I write satire or a personal story, I still find someone copying. Some people, just for the sake of making their blogs active copy full articles from others blogs. They don’t think that the owner of the host blog might have done some serious work to just create that post. Such people think that copying the most popular article from the successful blogs will give them high traffic and some search engine ranking.

Writer’s block

There are times when you wish you would write but you have no idea what to write about. All creative bloggers find themselves in this situation from time to time. It’s inevitable. Your prose has turned to mush, you don’t have a creative bone left in your body, and you want to throw in the towel. Even though writer’s block rarely hits me, I’ve wrestled with it on a few occasions, and each victory looked different. That’s the thing about writing: it’s an art, not a science. And you’ll have to approach it as such. There is no formulaic fix like “7 Steps to Write Great Things All The Time.” You just have to figure out your own way.

NOTE: Read today’s Etemesi’s Tales HERE