What you describe is hope, disillusionment and depression and it is a common cycle. The blogger who follows the other path and enter without false expectations are less likely to suffer and die.

Some are like oaks planted by the river. They can dig deep in the time of famine ad continue to do well.

All of us who spend any amount of time in this media are at one part of the continuum of another. This blog certainly gets more traction than a fresh Wordpress install, and it gets orders of magnitude less traction than then anyone on the Technorati top 100.

The fact is, no matter what your penetration, if you are willing to help out those people on either side of the traffic totem poll then you have been successful. A lot of times I believe that as bloggers we think that we are blogging in isolation. If we can’t make it to the top, then no one should.

This is simply not true.

The only way to make any headway in a medium like this is to understand there are a metric ton of people out there who feel like they are writing to the void. To understand that many of those people have great ideas and could use encouragement, and if possible give that encouragement too them.

Thanks for the response Kent. I’ll be visiting the blog again soon.

Amen. Great definition.

And we also want the information we share to be judged on its merits, not by who our friends are or are not.

There is nothing more discouraging than putting a ton of effort into thoughtful posts, linking to other bloggers’ thoughts on the issue, publishing it and…nothing.

What the in-crowd doesn’t realize (or at least is in denial about) is that blogging is still a niche, nerdy endeavor to most of the real world. At the very time these “pioneers” should be encouraging more people to join the club, they are acting in ways that are very exclusionary.

It’s rude to the newbies and self-defeating for the so called elite. Like the birds who are so busy chasing other birds aways from the kill that they fail to notice the lion carrying it away.

I would add one more to your list of solutions:

Find and nurture a list of compatible bloggers who will converse with you, engage in regular and substantive cross-blog communication with them, eagerly welcome other compatible bloggers into the caravan and, if you get lucky and become an A-Lister, remember where you came from and don’t start believing your own BS. If enough of us would do that, we could change the blogosphere for the better.