On Blogging Australia

I wrote the following article on Facibus On Blogging on 25 June 2007. I forgot to renew the domain name so Facibus On Blogging is now lost to me. I’ll republish the most popular posts here over the next few months.

Blogging once or twice is easy. Blogging for six weeks is fun. After that, you’re facing the monster and it becomes a duty. And the duty may be responsible for the tens of millions of inactive blogs.

So why do we bother blogging? What’s the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)? Will it sustain you when things get successful enough to be painful? I’d like to take a look at motivations for blogging and how sustainable they appear.

We’re motivated by a range of different things. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a good way to categorise motivators.

Let’s look at how these might work for bloggers, starting from the most basic deficiency needs upwards.

• Physiological needs are those required for minimal physical subsistence - the stuff that we need to live, and while I believe that all the layers of the pyramid are important, we can go without the others for short periods. Is it relevant as a motivator for bloggers? Unless you are being tortured into blogging, or use blogging itself for sexual gratification, then it probably doesn’t apply. I’d rate this as a fairly rare motivator.
• Safety is important - and I believe that this covers physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual safety. I can only think of a couple of cases where safety is a motivator for bloggers: (a) when the blogger’s personal beliefs rely on a view that needs to be promulgated through blogging (as in a spiritual mission), or (b) there is a fear of a loss of safety through not blogging (and granted, this could be the same thing). I’m guessing that both of these cases are extreme.
• Love/Belonging is where it starts to get interesting - there is a fine line between blogging because all of your friends do (acceptance of peer pressure is usually placed in the Love/Belonging category), and blogging for the recognition of your friends (which is probably placed in the Esteem category - can anyone confirm?). Regardless, I believe that Love and Belonging are noticeable motivators for bloggers. Will they be sustainable when things become impossibly successful? Love may conquer all, but could the lack of it motivate us to blog?
• Esteem is probably the easiest category of need to identify with blogging. If we look deep inside ourselves, chances are that most of us blog because we like the recognition that it brings. Sure, the recognition may be shared with a business or a partner. Low self esteem increases the need for recognition, but I wouldn’t draw the conclusion that successful bloggers have low self esteem. The esteem might come from blog income, an increase in services sales, or increased product awareness. It may be that the esteem payoff, if not forthcoming, is a prime source of the blog monster.
• Self-Actualisation is the first of Maslow’s growth needs, and is where a lot of us see ourselves as bloggers - we’re on a mission to improve ourselves and others. Sometimes we succeed :). While I jest, I believe that there is an important thing at work here - creativity. In blogging, we generally think, solving problems in a way that reinforces and extends this aspect of our life experience (in plain language, we use what we have to get what we want and what we have gets better as a result). I’d argue that while self-actualisation is essential to a well-rounded life, it is not a sustainable motivator for bloggers - exercising our creativity is usually a by-product rather than a key motive to keep blogging.

Regardless of the motivator, it needs to sustain us through the bad times. My pick for Maslow’s sustainable motivator of choice for bloggers is Esteem - at least in most cases. The esteem payoff comes through recognition - and I may be oversimplifying things here, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that the single best way to maintain motivation for bloggers is to be recognised by their peers.

What do you think? Tell me, please, because I’m trying to figure this out for myself.