Ever wake up and wonder why you’re here?  Not as a reader — we all know why we come to Bloggingtips.com, it’s for the content — but as a writer.  Ever faced that empty little window in WordPress and wondered the same thing for your blog?

I do that each time I sit down to write this post.  Every Thursday, in fact.  Why?  Because the rest of you intimidate the hell out of me.  You really do.  What, I ask my insecure self, do I possibly have to offer these folks who know so much more about the ins-and-outs of blogging than I do?

I’ve thought long and hard about it, and I realize I do indeed have something to offer.  And it has nothing at all to do with WordPress.  It has to do with words .

Allow me to begin with what I don’t know here in this realm, where I am as green behind the ears as a Star Trek extra .  The list, the source of my insecurity, is long.

I don’t know what headines such as “ Blogging on Android With WPTOGO ” means.  I don’t know what a “tiny URL” is.  To me, 404 is the number that follows 403, and products like Brizzly and Yonkly and Regator might as well be items on a Seneglese deli menu.

I’m a writer.  I’m tempted to say just a writer, but that’s actually my point today.  Maybe being just a writer is enough.  My hormones perk up with the new Dan Brown novel rather than the next release of… well, I don’t even know what witty techno-lingo ditty to use to complete that sentence in a hip way.

That’s all I have to work with.  And all of us have to start with something to offer if we want our blogs to actually go somewhere.

Because, like I said, I write .  I’m a tried and true, proven and crusty beneath all that green behind my ears writer of all kinds of things, including blogs.  And as such, and in spite of my techno-cluenessness, they tell me my new blog site — more of an instructional writing resource, actually — is taking off like a literary rocket.

I don’t offer that in an attempt to get you to go there.  Unless you’re interested in writing novels and screenplays, it may not be your thing.  I offer it to illustrate the inside-out nature of successful blogging — it’s what we bring from the inside that results in an outward growth in metrics.

Is 500 subscribers in the first two months good?  To be honest, I have nothing to compare it to.  But I’m told, and usually with an eye-rolling grin, that yeah, that’s pretty darn good.  My site should be well beyond 1000 subscriptions by year-end, with the potential of 3000 or more by the end of 2010 at this rate, after 18 months.

That feels pretty good, even to me.  And yet I continue to ask myself, why am I here ?

As bloggers, we should all ask ourselves that question.  Because our hope resides in the answer.  And when we consider the concept of hope, we must look in the mirror and ask what this is all about.

So if a completely lame web rookie like me can create a blog from scratch and sniff out 500 loyal subscribers in two months, and actually be generating positive cash flow from from it when everyone said that would require two years, what does that mean ?

It means it validates what those who really know about blogging are telling those of us who don’t.  What they say, combined with our personal little slice of content expertise, is all we have to go on.

Great content works.  Stuff that cuts to the heart of what readers need to hear to further their objectives.  Not ours, theirs.

Great context works.  By context, I mean describing the next whiz-bang killer app in terms that lead toward benefits rather than the wondrous intricasies of technical architecture.

Audience empathy works.  Frankly — perhaps too frankly for this venue — I don’t make it to second base with a lot of these technical posts because the author assumes the reader occupies a nearby seat on the learning curve .  We need to break it down, not dumb it down, so that the content is useful and accessible to all.

And finally, lively, rich and passionate writing works.  Writing that illuminates the author’s humanity and vulnerability while leveraging an inherent crediblity that is more obvious than overt.

Blog like a writer , not like a software engineer or an internet entrepreneur with an agenda.  Subordinate your goals and your business identity to the craft of putting your reader before yourself, and in a way that empowers.  And nothing empowers like rich and selfless content conveyed with a little spice.

That’s why I’m here today, and every Thursday.  Even if I’ve put too much self into this one.  In between posts I’ll keep reading and soaking up the greater wisdom of my peers , and I”ll use what I learn to empower my own blog toward greater reader friendliness and content richness.

The more we know, the better for us.  The better the manner in which we share what we know, the better for everyone.

If I can realize even the smallest contribution on the writing front, if only by example, then perhaps I won’t have to wonder what I’m doing here after all.  Because that’s my U.S.P.  — Unique Selling Proposition — as a writer and as a blogger.

And, because most of what we know is rarely unique, our U.S.P. is really all that we have in the long run.