Rediscovering the Joy of Blogging

I might have been pregnant when I started my first blog. If so, the year was 2006. If not, I started a year or two later. I can’t remember how many posts I ultimately published to that first blog, but what I do remember is that it was fulfilling and fun. I wrote brief personal stories about my life with the goal of encouraging fellow believers to strengthen their faith. I connected every post to a spiritual lesson.

Then, I got greedy.

I heard that you could make money with a website, just by writing a few 600-word articles a week. Knowing that my husband no longer liked his job, I decided I was going to be his hero and begin to write content that would bring visitors to my blog who would click on an ad or an affiliate link.

I was going to replace my husband’s income, and then some.

Suffice to say that I’ve had a love-hate relationship with blogging ever since. Mostly hate, and it has nothing to do with the fact that I only ever earned a few hundred dollars (that's lifetime, not monthly or even annually) via blogging. It’s that nobody reads blogs to connect with others or share in their personal life. They go to YouTube and Instagram for that. Nowadays, if you want to get traffic to a blog, you have to pretend you’re an expert about a certain highly-searched topic and write the equivalent of a thesis paper at least once a week. Two thousand words or bust.

And every single blog post for the life of the blog must be about the same topic.

The state of blogging today:

No fun.

No fulfillment.

No writing from your heart.

Nope.

You have to follow a bunch of rules. You have to worry every second about keywords, metadata, links, and content over-delivery. You have to stick to one topic. If you don’t, the search engines won’t consider you an authority on anything you write about and will pass you by.

Blogging is now a job. A job, I might add, that doesn’t guarantee a stable or steady income… if it provides any income at all.

They say that if you start an online business via a blog, you’re in charge of your own destiny.

No.

You’re.

Not.

Google is.

As a matter of fact, Google is the reason for the death of the truly personal blog, an online space where people used to share their lives, and a lot of other like-minded people would come to read it and share their own perspectives in the comment section.

If there are any such blogs today that get a lot of monthly visitors, it’s either because they began fifteen-plus years ago and the bloggers grew a huge audience before Google changed the rules, or because they are run by celebrities.

My fall into the blogging matrix… and my climb back out.

Earlier this year, I decided that I was going to market my books in large part by turning this blog into an authority Christian website. If you read the last four or five posts, you can see that I jumped through all the hoops: most are at least two thousand words long, loaded with relevant keywords, and give step-by-step information. I’d planned to include a weekly Bible study, and write articles that answered the top questions and issues that Christians ask and face.

Whether I really cared about the questions and issues or not. Whether I had personal experience with them, or not.

I was bored and feeling trapped after writing the second article.

I stuck to it for longer. If I could just get in the habit of churning out those tedious, impersonal articles, it wouldn’t be so bad after a while, right?

Wrong.

These days, if something doesn’t give me joy or fulfillment, I drop it like a hot potato.

So I stopped and backed away. Gave my blog and myself some space.

And came to realize something.

The mere act of writing gives me joy, as long as I’m writing from the heart. I don’t need anyone else to read it.

So.

I’m reverting back to the “good ol’ days” of blogging. I’m going to share personal stories and insights in order to encourage believers on their spiritual journey. And, whenever I feel like it, I’m also going to write about other topics about which I have an undying interest.

This is not going to be an authoritative blog.

It’s going to be a personal blog. Because I’m going to get personal. I’m going to share my mountains and valleys, my struggles and triumphs. I’m also going to share things that I’ve learned that I believe are important for others to know.

Whether they relate to Christian encouragement or not.

But I’m not going to worry about SEO or Google. I’m not going to care about views. I’m not going to try to be an “authority.”

Authorities often get it wrong.

I’m going to write to encourage and inspire, and pray that God sends the people here who need to consume my content.

And now I’m going to publish this post, knowing that I might be the only person who ever reads it.

If you do read it, please take a minute to share your thoughts about the death (or revival!) of personal blogging in the comments. Let me know someone is out there who agrees with me. 😉

(For more inspiring content like this, you can follow this blog if you have a Google account, bookmark this blog, follow my blog on Goodreads, and/or check out the books in the sidebar.)