What To Expect: Your First Blogiversary

Congratulations, Blogger! You've posted for one year (One Hundred Blog years). As you celebrate yourself yet again, take a few moments to pause for self-reflection and blog assessment.


What You May Be Doing:

By now you’ve probably trashed that Minima template in favor of some custom design. You may have hired a professional, or maybe your burgeoning self-confidence with html coding resulted in a painful extraction from your deskchair with the jaws of life after a 72 hour bender resulting in your return to your original Minima Template (but with three columns!)

More than likely, you’ve found a peergroup and developed some friendships you value as much as In Real Life. You might even take your blog relationship to the next level, engaging in phone conversations about blogging. In fact, the mere suggestion that these friends are “imaginary” may send you into a spiral requiring you to scribe an entire post devoted to validating the genuineness of your blog relationships.

Bloggy identity crisis are common at this juncture. For instance, you may feel that your dedication to iambic pentameter stifles your Sestina within. You may even experiment with multiple blogs. Rest assured, you need not conform to one bloggy identity, and may explore blogging along the continuum from humor, to soulfulness, and from parenting to product porn. Most people do--it's a healthy part of blogging and nothing to feel ashamed of.

You may experience a decrease in blog appetite. Your once insatiable desire for Memes, may now be reduced to reading only the first three-quarters of a post from people who visit your blog. Eventually you may visit only blog posts linked on Twitter. In fact, you may read very few blogs of even your dearest blog friends, and feel a fair amount of guilt. This guilt is appropriate, as many people are probably seething at your poor bloggy reciprocity. Never fear, eventually you will find a methodical system to sort of satisfy no one.

You may begin viewing your blogging habit as part of your "career development" justifying large expenditures for equipment and travel to conferences. You may even begin referring to blogging as "working" and feel disdain toward the word "hobby" You may or may not wear your "Born To Blog" t=shirt in public, rather than just for night night. Don't minimize these instincts--they comprise a healthy part of bloggy individuation and maturation.


By One year, you should be able to:
hyperlink with ease
upload audio and video
utilize basic statcounter or google analytics

...will probably be able to
identify complex bloggy acronyms
superstrike text
orchestrate a paypal transaction

...may even be able to
create your own button
hyperlink within a comment
understand the functionality of backlinks

What You May Be Wondering About

"My friend just had her first blogiversary and she did this huge giveaway and got dozens of new followers. Should I do a giveaway just to get followers? Why isn't my blog more popular? What's it all mean? Where's Godot? Is he with Meme?"

After one year of blogging you might begin questioning yourself about the best use of your time. You might start obsessing over your audience, and how to increase your readership. . You may find yourself perseverating over who your friends "really are" and "what it all means, anyway." Twelve month bloggers thrive when clear limits are provided, and this might be a good time to provide yourself some structure. Take comfort in the fact that you will never find satisfactory answers to these questions, so you might as well continue to show up and keep writing.



**I couldn't resist this bloggy rendition of Sarah Schmelling’s What to Expect: The 39th Year. Do not miss it.