So not too long ago, I decided to try and revive my efforts of adding new content to my website. I had looked at all the reasons I thought it wasn’t fun anymore and why I rarely did it, even though uhmm, I’m a writer, and I’m supposed to love to write. And I do like writing blogs. So what was stopping me?
Me, myself and I.
I had grand ideas about what to do with this blog once upon a time, but ALL of those ideas were a hell of a lot of work for a single post. Too much work. So much work that it became debilitating. So even though the ideas were good ones, they weren’t good enough. Because I’m a firm believer, as a marketer, you have to enjoy your methods of marketing. And blogging — well, it’s not my primary focus. It’s sort of like the bowl of popcorn on the side table at your favorite bar. You love the popcorn. You grab some every time you’re there and enjoy every last piece.
But it’s not why you show up in the first place.
[Tweet “Blogging is like a bowl of popcorn.”]
Since blogging is a side benefit of my main goal — to write, to get to know readers and let them get to know me — the ten million things I told myself I needed to do, should be talking about, shouldn’t be writing about, how long those should or shouldn’t or needed to be were definitely not helping. So I decided to just write whatever the heck I wanted. However long it ended up. And see what happened. that means whatever comes to my mind in the moment, I’ll make a note. And that has resulted in me finding the things I like to talk about… not necessarily what I think I should be talking about. And if nothing else, that makes this blog a lot more genuine, a lot more real.
Now as any blogging individual will tell you, if you set your level of success by the number of comments you get, well… *crickets*… But for my revival efforts, that wasn’t a measure of success. My measure of success was whether or not I could enjoy the process again. Whether I could enjoy the writing. I also wanted to see if it would help keep me focused on my writing goals. (Deadline in November. Not admitting to how many words I don’t have written yet.)
So when I threw out the self-imposed “rules” about blogging, did I enjoy it more? Yes.
Did I like writing for my blog again? Yuppers.
Will I keep it up? You betcha.
Will anyone read it? I don’t know. You tell me. 🙂 But I’ll have a lot of fun doing it anyway.
Featured image by Joaklm Wahlander | Flickr