The Diaries Episode One: What Blogging Isn’t

June marks L&C’s one year anniversary and as part of our celebration, I asked you guys what you wanted to see more of from us and what you wanted me to dish about on The Bonus Blog.  And while we have talked about blogging almost exclusively on the The Bonus Blog, you said you wanted me to dive deeper.

And I get that, because after finishing my first year of blogger, it wasn’t that long along when I was consuming a massive amount of information on Pinterest, other blogs, course, YouTube, seminars, e-books and etc (as a matter of fact I’m still googling all of these things) trying to get a handle on this thing we call blogging.

Here on The Bonus Blog, we have already covered procrastination verses perfectionism, branding and content creation.  But in this series - Diary Of A First Year Blogger: The Hot Mess You Wish Bloggers Wrote About - we are going to cover the basic blogging issues and obstacles which new bloggers face and I’ll share with you the information that I found while scouring the Internet; and how I clicked it all together.

Now to be clear — I am not a blogging expert.  I do not have all this blogging stuff figured out.  But I am prepared to share with you the information that I desperately wished other new bloggers wrote about.  You know the, “Hey guys...I’m a few months ahead of you in my blogging journey and it’s a note mess.”  Because EVERYBODY feels better when they know they are not the only ones out here on the blogging struggle bus.  So that’s what this is.  Me confirming for you that “Yes” it is hard,  “Yes” it is a mess, “Yes” you are doing it right and “No” you are not alone.  I am right here on the struggle bus next to you.  

So with that introduction out of the way, let’s get into our first mini episode: What Blogging Isn’t.

What Blogging Isn’t

Now many of you will recall that Paris was in the feed the other day and she mentioned that blogging is not about writing.  Now before you flip out and think I am bashing writers, please know that I consider myself a writer both by passion (I love writing) and by education (for lack of a better descriptor).  And what I mean by that is I majored in Journalism back in college, interned at news stations during that time, won the Senior These Award in the Humanities for my senior thesis in literature, have worked editing copy for a major corporation, etc.

So all of that is to say: I love writing.  And from that vantage point, I can say after a year of blogging it is not about writing because if were only about writing as soon as you hit publish, the masses would arrive to read your post.  But you can write the most amazing content, SEO it up like a pro, edit it, optimize it and slay it on your website and...nothing happens.  Nobody comes.  No one sees it.  Google takes months to decide whether your website is spam or not.  And then it finally does decide to rank you it’s not on page one.  It’s buried behind dozens if not hundreds of pages.

So it’s not about writing.  And before we get into what blogging is about, I have one more reminder about what blogging isn’t.  It’s actually more like advice about my own personal definition of blogging.

I wish someone had sat me down and asked me what is my definition of blogging.    Because once you start to get out onto social media and other platforms to promote your blog, it’s very easy to have a little bit of a blogging identify crisis.  There are lots of different ways to blog.

On social media you will see bloggers without an actual website — they are more like social media bloggers.  When you say you want to blog, do you mean you really want to be an influencer?  Do you really want to work with brands on sponsored content?  Do you want to sell digital or physical products?  Do you really want to do affiliate marketing?

Before you start a blog, you need to be really intentional about what type of blogging you want to engage in because it’s very easy to get confused or distracted once you get out here and see all the amazing ways other bloggers operate.  So be very specific so that you don’t end up getting confused and become ineffective with your growth strategy.

Without a purpose you can easily end up on the content creation hamster wheel to nowhere.  And what I mean by that, is you can end up pumping out content in a manner where you are not positioning yourself to make any traction.