Given the very personal, voice rich and decloaked nature of writing your own blog, many of the challenges in sustaining a blog for the long run can be themselves be grounded in the fact that you are so personally invested in it :

1. Since its a one man job (mostly) your own personal circumstances, mood and availablilty all combine to impinge and sway your mood, output and or frequency compared with if you were a small cog in a bigger wheel operation, where there’s a momentum to carry you on your off days/weeks/months.

2. Meta blogging; wild and often deeply philosophical tangential discussions and debates about the new medium, the social or professional effects of it, and so on are, in essence, off-topic (though fantastically interesting in themselves) and can indirectly serve to distract and undermine your core focus and move the focus away from the core value proposition you’re supposed to be writing about in the first place.

3. You need buckets of passion first and foremost. And this cannot be affected, it needs to actually be in you. Closely followed by conviction and discipline.

4. Don’t focus too much on the creation of attention seeking posts or topics in order to rapidly build or an audience. In the short term you may be able to sustain this approach and drive up traffic and create a healthy debate around your site and topics, but it’s very hard to sustain this for any period of time (especially if you’re a one mand band or small team) and an ultimately temporary surge in activity, posting, comments and traffic is only going to depress you a month down the line when everyone’s moved on. Also be prepared for active members of your audience or the community around your blog to disappear of the face of the planet without warning and never come back. Easy to mistake the fickle and fragile nature of the medium for people
actually switching off to you personally.

People drift about.