Are they Milestones, Scores or Hurdles?

I think bloggers might be the most self-critical people I have ever met. In some cases monitoring our own progress can be a great thing, I expect we have all worked with people who we wish would have cared more about their own performance! But when we routinely beat ourselves up, something has to change.

Look around the forums and blog posts of struggling bloggers. Have you noticed how many ways we compare and grade ourselves?

• Comment count
• How many Adsense dollars we make
• Do we attract private advertising?
• Affiliate commissions, even the name “super affiliate”
• Google PageRank
• Monthly “Uniques” and page views
• Technorati #100
• Subscriber count
• Digg votes

You can probably think of more but you get the point 🙂

If you are feeling like a loser because of any single metric, stop! This is not a competition where you have to keep a score card. Metrics are there to help, not to make you feel bad.

All too often people start to blog because it is fun, then start to feel sad when they turn it into a popularity contest. I have even started to see the same thing happen on StumbleUpon where people are comparing how many stumbles they have made, how many friends they have, etc.

Consider why you are blogging. What made you start? What keeps you blogging?

Select metrics that help you towards that goal, keep doing things that make the metrics improve, and do not lose sleep over them.

Most of all, enjoy the process.

Blogging can be difficult enough without adding unnecessary pressure 🙂