Worry-Free Blogging, Impossible?

Here’s the simple question: Can you blog successfully without worrying about things like branding, differentiation, niche selection, search engine optimization, buzz marketing, and all that rocket science materials?

Here’s my intuition answering: Yes, it’s possible.

And now, here’s my brain trying to figure out why I just said that it’s possible.

First, of course we must define success. And that ties tightly with the purpose of the blog itself. For me, the purpose for this blog is to be useful. Fortunately, I haven’t set any measurement on how useful it should be. Whether one person or one thousand person benefit from my posts, I’ll still define it as useful. Therefore, I will feel that this blog is successful when I can provide useful contents, even for just one person, and even if that person is myself.

But then, it can’t be that simple, right? Intuitively, I would need to bring more visitors, in hope that more people can benefit from this blog. I know, I know, you might have heard something like this before from Steve Pavlina’s blog, but it’s being repeated here only because it’s true. Without building traffic, I also risk ruining my success in the long run. An unread post does not exist no matter how useful.

And this is where the rocket science methods from the first paragraph come into play: those techniques bring traffic.

So, I guess the answer is balance? The completely worry-free method would be to ignore the branding and other methods above, and I would simply post and post to my heart’s content. This poses the risk above, though, so I eventually will have to do the methods. Not too heavily, of course, otherwise it might trouble me enough that I lost interest to this blog (no way!).

To be completely truthful, I’m terrible at balancing. While I believed what I just wrote above to be a good solution, I don’t think that’s personally realistic for me.

Now that I think of it, I’d propose one alternative. Well, actually, one alternative that’s comprised of two steps:

1. Focus on creating useful content.
2. Join the conversation.

Plan #1 is rather obvious. Plan #2, as highbrow as it sounds, is in reality a plan in which I will visit the other blogging blogs and try to join what’s being discussed there. I hope I can contribute things, by leaving comments most likely, which in turns might make people interested enough in me to pay this little blog a visit.

This alternative, for me, is worry-free because plan #1 is what I’m supposed to do anyway, and plan #2 is pretty fun to do and I’m genuinely interested in blogging after all.

Yosh, that would be it, my Worry-Free Blogging plan. What’s yours?

Or would you prefer the methods, even if it’s difficult?