Jealousy, Envy, Greed … These Things Can Be DangerousBlogging is an interesting activity, allowing writers to record journals, discuss endless topics, or just about anything else a person might want to do with an online presence. Readers can also benefit from this amateur journalistic platform as, with the seemingly endless number of blogs available, they’re able to find articles providing information, like-minded opinions, conflicting opinions, or anything else we might be looking for at a given time.

One exciting aspect of blogging is the potential to make it big and start to earn a respectable amount of “street cred” and, hopefully, a healthy amount of money. While it can’t possibly happen to every online writer, seeing others meet or exceed their goals and expectations can give the rest of us hope. How often do we see other bloggers try a little harder after someone earns a nice sum of money or signs a book deal? One person’s success can often be beneficial to the whole, and vice versa.

However, with great success comes great jealousy. I had the opportunity to take part in a conversation (if you can even call it that) recently where one person was hideously jealous of Christian Lander and his recent success with Stuff White People Like.

The topic started out innocently enough. We were discussing some recent success stories online when the relatively new site by Lander was brought up. The blog was started back in January of this year and, within a very short amount of time, has gained an incredible following and has appeared on the front pages of Digg and Reddit several times. In a surprising move, someone from Random House approached this newbie blog author and asked him to write a book while waving a thick wad of cash and, not surprisingly, a deal was signed.

Good for Christian Lander! His success gives me hope that one day my passionate rages against the various governments of the world will either land me a sweet book deal or a place in Guantanimo. Can you imagine how many hits this site would receive if it was learned I was arrested and shipped to the opposite side of the planet for my content?

Seriously though, Stuff White People Like is a perfect example of how people can quickly make it big in the world of blogging. We can’t do what everyone else does and expect to stand out. We can’t just post random strings of text and call them sentences. If people really want to make it in this realm of ever transcient readers, we need to offer something that is both unique and enjoyable. At the end of the day, what we need to offer is simple: link bait.

That said, most of us are not writing posts that scream for attention. The jealous blogger I was talking to last week is certainly someone that falls into this category. In almost two years of blogging he’s managed to keep an irregular schedule, with most posts consisting of under 60 words … 30 of which are a rough description to a YouTube video that may or may not have already been taken off the site because he’s posting something that he found on the front page of Digg.

To add insult to injury, this guy can’t spell. He can hardly put a sentence together with proper particle usage. He doesn’t understand that we should try and avoid sentences that use past and present tenses together. He can’t even get a partially structured thought out in his poorly paraphrased posts of problematic quality. When it comes down to it, this guy is one of the reasons people don’t take professional bloggers seriously.

So why is he so jealous?

Me, Me, Me!

With all the overnight winners we’ve seen in the last six months, it’s certainly understandable why some of the long-term bloggers are a little frustrated with their lack of fame. We’ve seen some people publicly call out some of the most popular sites and get a backlink and public rebuttal, causing a huge influx of traffic and spots on the social media sites. We’ve seen others write something truly unique and quickly gain a huge following.

So what do we do when we see these fast-rising stars? We click some links, read their content, and either comment or congratulate them on making something worth reading online. Others, however, tend to look at this through a different pair of glasses. They’re left with thoughts like, “I can write better than this,” “My stuff is much better than this,” or some other variation of the same incorrect thought.

If their content was truly superior to the stuff we see in fast-rising blogs, then they would have also been one of the fast-risers. The internet is dominated by a pseudo-democracy, where quality content is rewarded with kudos and crap is ignored or otherwise forgotten before we even hit the “back” button on our browsers.

Jealousy Is A Content Killer

With over 200-million blogs in various languages being updated all over the blogosphere, there are bound to be some successful writers every now and again.  But how often do we actually hear about these successes?  If we were to think about all the famous bloggers you’ve heard about over the last five years, how many names would come to our head?  Under a hundred?

Making it big in a realm where anyone and everyone can give their two cents is nowhere near as easy as one might hope.  Rather than bitch and moan when someone makes a couple of bucks with their website, those who feel jealous or otherwise inferior to these “newbie bloggers” should really re-examine their own content to find out where the disconnect is.

Most of us are not popular or wealthy for a reason, but our financial futures are not cast in stone.