Some mornings I wake up with tons of ideas for new blog posts, new followers and never-ending excitement. Blogging is something I'm truly passionate about, I write my posts with my heart and pick my images with care (well, most of the time). Waking up on mornings like these is amazing.
Yet some mornings I wake up to comments from people asking for follow-for-follows, Twitter and Instagram follows from people who will unfollow if I don't follow them back within five minutes and generic sponsored posts. On those days I'm not excited to start working on my blog. On those days I suffer from Blogger Blues.

There are many awesome things about blogging, but lately I've got to known the ugly side of blogging much better. If you have time, read this post here - just promise you come back to my blog after reading.
If you don't have that much time I'll tell you about the post: a former mommy blogger just shared all the nasty secrets about how big blogs became big. Just reading about it made me feel sick to my stomach. All the things I hate were featured: following people only to unfollow if they don't return the favour (apparently that's a highly recommended strategy), or just writing what the brands want you to write, even though you don't like their products. How can anyone do that?
My case of Blogger Blues just became so much worse while reading this post. I never understood how boring blogs with tons of spelling mistakes and cliche posts could be so popular. Now I do: follow-for-follows, letting people follow so they can enter a giveaway and if necessary, buy followers.
When I was done reading I looked at my follower count and felt cheated. Just that. Cheated.

I see bloggers who post the same generic, badly written posts that a thousand others have already posted and these people make it big, while my blog buddies and I go almost unnoticed. The reason behind that? My buddies don't use cheap methods to quickly grow a huge (but largely uninterested) audience. It's frustrating to see genuine and awesome posts receive not even a fraction of the attention that an extremely obviously sponsored post about diapers gets. It's frustrating to scrape together pageviews on a post you've written with all your heart, it's frustrating to see your friend's amazing blog not get the amount of followers it deserves.

Now at this point I can do two things: let my Blogger Blues get the best of me and grow bitter, or try to make it big in the blogging world by remaining true to myself. I will always choose the latter of those two options.
Yes, a lot of bloggers 'cheat' their way to the top. A lot of them do not and will never produce the high quality posts some completely unknown bloggers write. A lot of them are only in it for the money and the goodies. That's not me. I started blogging because I love writing. I rather receive two sincere comments on my posts than a thousand generic ones. I only follow people on Twitter if I had a nice chat with them or if they're just simply awesome. That might not be the quickest way to the top, but I do believe it's a good way. In the end, awesomeness always wins.