21 Dec Are we Braggarts?

I’ve been thinking, lately, about the nature of blogging. Bloggers like myself pick a subject we personally find relevant, be it business or food or simply our lives. Then we write about it and hope that someone, somewhere, will read our words and find them interesting enough to come back for more.
This is, I think, a benign form of narcissism. It is one that is shared by many professions, true, but I think it becomes most apparent in the blogging community. If you write, say, a novel, you have a gage for the level of interest. You send the novel out to all the publishers in the genre and if no one bites, you know that you need to change it up. If you do get the novel published, your sales will tell you whether or not there might be readers chomping at the bit for more.
That’s just not the way it works in the so-called “blogosphere.” When you write a blog post, you publish it into the digital world and just hope against hope that of the millions of similar posts someone will pick yours to read. Then, after they read it, they will find it was so compelling, so full of useful or interesting information, that they will check back again and again to see if you have written more.
Conceited, n’est pas?
But most bloggers, I think, have good intentions. They don’t just post random nonsense and hope someone will read it. Instead, they feel the words they are writing need to be given a voice so that they can help other people. A lifestyle blogger may feel they are giving readers someone they can relate to. A food blogger may want to share the joy of a well-prepared and newly discovered recipe. I, myself, like to think I help people with businesses navigate the digital marketing realm, and that they can benefit from my experience there.
We don’t know when we hit the “Submit” button if anyone will read our words, much less enjoy them, but we still feel like our opinions and experiences are important enough to share. Basically, we write these posts because we feel that someone out there in the vast digital sea might want to read what we have to say. Is this conceited, or narcissistic? Probably. But if our intention is to help someone, is that really such a bad thing?