I’m back in DC after a wonderful trip to San Francisco for BlogHer 08. I was an official live blogger for three conference sessions, one of which was “Building Traffic via Content and Community“. The session was incredibly informative and thought-provoking, and I wanted to talk a bit more about it today. One of the first questions the moderator (Elise of Simply Recipes) posed to the audience was “Why do you blog?”

Er. Um. Because everyone else is doing it?

Seriously–I don’t know about you, but I had never asked myself that question before. I’ve given a great deal of thought to what I blog ABOUT (personal development, career, finding your purpose, body image and disordered eating), to the kind of message I want to communicate to my readers (you can do it!), to the way my website looks (snazzy new redesign), but I had never asked myself why I’m blogging in the first place.

Elise asked the question because bloggers often set a goal for themselves of increasing traffic. If you were to google “increase blog traffic”, you’d nearly half a million hits focused on the multitude of tricks and tools you can employ to drive readers to your blog. But to what end? For what purpose?

One of the most common answers bloggers give to that question is “to make money”. More traffic = more clicks = more ad revenue = $$$$. OK. Fair enough. That makes sense. But in the vast universe that is the blogosphere, only a small percentage are lucrative enough to serve as a sole source of income. Making it big requires superb content, prolonged growth over several years, and more than a little bit of luck.

What’s more, Heather Armstrong of Dooce (who, by the way, seems totally cool and like someone I’d really enjoy drinking margaritas with) spoke at the closing session about the level of commitment and the amount of time it takes in order to maintain financially successful blog. She routinely spends 10-12 hours per day (every day–not just Monday through Friday) on her blog. With the exception of a few guest blogged entries, Heather personally writes every post. She reads every email and comment she gets, and that includes some unbelievably vicious hate mail. She monitors the participants in her ad network to ensure that she believes what’s being advertised on her site. She maintains the technical integrity of the site. It is, she stressed, A LOT of work.

I don’t know about you, but that rules out money as my primary reason for blogging. That’s just not what I want to do.

After some thought, I identified the following as reasons why I blog:

• To help myself. By focusing my blog on personal development–which includes (for me, at least) finding my purpose, translating it into a career, building good habits, getting rid of bad ones, improving my body image, and kicking the ass of disordered eating–I actually wind up working through a lot of my own issues and problems.
• To help others. I really, truly want to help people. I want to inspire and motivate people (especially women). I want to see them achieve their goals. I want to help them find their purpose and live their dreams (hence the new tagline).
• To build a community. I want to create a community of women that help, motivate, encourage, and inspire others.
• To become a better writer. It’s pretty simple–the more you write, the better you write. Elise suggested looking back at some of your early blog entries for an illustration of this. It’s so true!

I could focus on increasing my blog traffic to support my goals of helping others and building a community, but after some reflection, I’ve realized that it’s actually more rewarding to me to have a dedicated (if smaller) readership that I deeply care about. Building traffic just isn’t that important to me.

That said, I’ll definitely be making some changes to my blog based on Elise’s session. I’m going to use the “more” tag instead of having the full text of long posts on my main page. I’ll probably declutter by removing some items from my sidebars. I may reduce my frequency of posting from 5 times per week to 3-4 to enable me to devote more time to writing quality articles (what are your thoughts on that, by the way?). I’ll use more images and photos. I’d like to launch a few community-building blog events and initiatives. (Any ideas, anyone?) I want to make my blog BETTER, not BIGGER.

What about you–why do you blog? What are your goals for your blog?