Blogging for me has always been a very cyclical thing. The cycle looks something like this:
- Find something interesting that motivates me to write.
- After writing that first post, I’ll usually follow up with a few more over the next few weeks.
- Blog again looks like a ghost town about 2-3 weeks later.
Some of the reasons for this are that I feel like my site has no purpose and that my thoughts don’t matter in the context of the entire Internet. I have found myself thinking that surely there is someone smarter and more eloquent than I am that can, and is, describing any topic that I write about…
This cycle I go through is what interested me in Mike Johnston’s flash talk at the 2014 Grand Meetup in Utah.
I don’t like blogging
Mike’s presentation had to do largely with his recent dislike of personal blogging, which hit home with me because I find that I tend to blog in patterns.
I was currently going through a dislike of blogging myself, which I found odd because I work at Automattic (company behind WordPress.com).
At the grand meetup I brought this subject up to James Huff who gave me a few words of wisdom which he’s used to build his blog to 3,000+ followers. The most impactful thing that James told me was that I should change the way I look at my blog — I should start looking at my blog as something meant for me, such as a way to look back at my life.
This really changed things for me as I could then blog without worrying about whether the message fit into some overall strategy or purpose. From now on, I could simply post things that I thought were interesting, helpful, funny, etc.
The Result
The overall result so far has been a very noticeable increase in how much I post to my blog. You can see this for yourself by comparing the 16 posts I wrote in October to the single post I wrote in June.
In the past month or so, I have blogged about a greater variety of things, including: photos, development tutorials, the death of my daughter, and my work at Automattic.
Photo Credit: Kristina B