Hello,
When I stopped blogging I didn't plan it - my last post was never supposed to be my last post. Many things conspired to make it so.
Going back to work was one - while I wasn't working full time, working freelance with it's crazy on-again off-again timetable made writing consistently tricky.
And also I struggled with some of the peripheral elements of blogging. I found there was always a bit too much advice about how one should blog - fulfil a need! know your niche! grow your audience! - and quite a bit of pressure to engage in tangential social media for promotion.
Maybe I put a bit too much stock in all the noise around blogging. I found it hard to zone out to a lot of that and to just hone in on what my own objectives are with blogging.
In thinking about it though I only have two, very clear priorities:
1. Writing
2. Community building
That's it. Simples.
Perhaps in the past I mistook promotion for community building. But it's really not the same at all, is it? Promoting is about selling your product or yourself to someone, convincing them, in a way that you or your thing is the one for them. I'm really not into that.
Community building is about sharing ideas and starting conversations with people and building relationships. That is much more my speed for sure.
Obviously there is a bit of overlap in the ideas of community building and promoting. Growing your audience, I think that's somewhat important for most bloggers, I mean we all want what we write to actually be read, right?
I think the key point of differentiation is authenticity. My blog is not a business, it's not selling or advertising anything so I have no vested interest in growing it's audience just for the sake of numbers. No-one but me is interested in how many views a particular post has had. So there is no need for promotion for promotions sake.
In fact one of my older posts somehow had vastly more views than any of my other posts (absolutely no reason why, but I suspect bots) and as a result I did not attract any more regular readers than I already had. All it did was increase my spam exponentially.
I've really no interest in having high stats. What I want is engaged people reading my words and enjoying them. And for me to read theirs and enjoy them too.
I know for sure that I got swept up in a lot of the 'busyness' of promoting my posts, engaging with other bloggers and generally wearing myself out with ideas that I would read about like scheduled social media posts, engagement, hits, likes, stats. I never really worked any of that stuff out and all it did was give me anxiety and reduce my time for writing.
So it's good to be back and to finally have a really clear understanding about my priorities for this space. It's all about the writing and the relationships. and I really do hope you'll come along for the ride - again!
If you are reading this post and have a blog of your own feel free to post a link in the comments and I'll be sure to check it out.
If you want to connect on other platforms you can find me on Facebook @onesmalllife and Instagram @onesmalllife too - be sure to say "Hi"
I've got a post about meditation planned for next time, I hope to see you then.
x
Top Image via Mike Erskine at Unslpash
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