In most of my life, that’s been the key: just picking a direction and going. The hardest part, as the cliché says, is getting started.
Yesterday, I waffled back and forth about blocking here, on my professional site, where I invite prospective clients to make sure I’m real and to look at my portfolio. I want to blog about topics unrelated to content marketing, so is this really the best place for that? Also, I’m planning an overhaul that could include a major redesign, so it seems like a good time to move the blog if that’s what I’m going to do.
I went back and forth like that all day, and was still thinking about it this morning. Finally, I decided that if I want to blog again, I need to just blog again. As I discuss the future of this website with a designer, I’ll reconsider whether or not this is the best place for it to permanent reside or not. Just as there are arguments against writing about gardening, running, pets, personal opinions, or whatever else on my professional site, there’s also the fact that I don’t try to hide my human-ness from my clients. I don’t mind if they get to know me as a person.
Anyway, this is hopefully the first of many posts to come. I’m on a one-person crusade to bring blogging back in the face of social media platforms behaving badly and the world essentially being scary right now. I want to read about other people’s pets and hobbies and favorite recipes and I want to share mine, too. And, really, if I worked in an office, I’d discuss those things with my co-workers, so I don’t necessarily feel it’s unprofessional to talk about them here.
Do you have a blog? I’d love to add it to my Feedly stream. Drop a link in the comments. Let’s bring blogging back together!
Photo of me, contemplating this decision on a walk.
Comments 6
I love reading blogs. I listed the current ones I write on your Twitter feed yesterday. Glad you’re back blogging!
Author
Yes! I still haven’t added the rest of them to Feedly, but am definitely going to. I like the depth you get with blogs compared to social media.
May I join the crusade? I love blogs, but there are so few left. And some are just awful or haven’t been updated in years.
Author
I think you’ve been leading the crusade! This blog definitely had a “fallow” period of several years. The more dissatisfied I feel with social media (and that level is increasing quickly) the more I miss this format.
You know me; I don’t have pets or hobbies. But my blog shows my personality in other ways, with all the references to pop culture (mostly TV) and my attempts to learn Italian. I like a blog to give me three things: information I didn’t know before, intriguing approaches to things I haven’t thought about in that way, and goofiness. I should say humor, but you know I lean toward the silly and goofy side of things.
When people ask what I did during the pandemic, I’m sometimes hard-pressed to come up with major stories: I did a lot of zoom webinars and recorded education, but I didn’t work with clients except virtually, at least until I got vaccinated. But I did begin blogging regularly again, one post almost every Monday for the past year and a half. It gave me more structure in my weird, pandemic-y week, and it prompted me to read more blogs, both in and outside of my field. Blogs are good! And as long as you don’t make ME go out into nature, hearing about your adventures is delightful.
Author
Structure during the pandemic helped, didn’t it? Our lives here didn’t really change all that much, other than not getting to see our kids as much as we wanted or normally would. I’m glad you’ve kept up your blog!