I’m excited to start off this year with a renewed motivation to blog as much as possible. The past few years have been challenging for me on the blogging front, which I found surprising since I have never been more productive in my life. Everything took a drastic turn since I decided to become a single mom and started Google Developer Group. My blogs became victims of neglect. I’m not going to justify my reasons for not blogging as much as I should.
And the reason is
I have noticed that the number one culprit of me not blogging much is due to the ease of resharing content in social media, and the instant gratification I get out of people responding via likes, comments, shares, and retweets.
Social media really does give out a false sense of productivity, when in actual fact, all I was doing is reading someone else’s status updates. It might as well be equivalent to a sort of gossiping/voyeuristic experience. I mean, reading them is fun in a sense, but what I ended up doing is absorbing information without much synthesis. It’s only when I synthesise information that I can make it useful and relevant to me. When I don’t synthesise, I express less. And when I express less, I blog or write less.
Ideas constantly and consistently come to me. However, once I sit in front of my laptop, the words refuse to come out. My brain freezes. I had to go back to Facebook or whichever social media I recalled reading that idea from, and by that time, I’ll be distracted by the latest status updates of other people I follow.
This has become a cruel cycle.
Recapturing my blogging form
The only sure way — and I state this with confidence — for me to get my blogging form back is by lessening my time on social media. I’m already feeling the impact of going just three hours off social media. It allowed me today to finish a 1,000+ blog post on one of the blogs I maintained (although I’m flabbergasted that it had to take me a whole dog-gone three hours to finish a blog post! Totally out of my form).
Compartmentalising blog content
And then, there’s the issue of how I should maintain content for the different blogs I own.
Luckily, I’ve earlier on have very specific goals for each of my blogs. It’s a habit I developed out of my years learning search engine optimisation. Mixing stuff in one website = lower search engine ranking. The more focused your content is, the better chance that your site will appear as part of the top results. I currently maintain the following:-
- WebGrrrl.net (this site): Strictly (supposedly) on web development, blogging, startups, my professional experience, and general Internet goodness. Many technical stuff, in a nutshell.
- WebGrrrlnet @ WordPress.com: Very random, drivels, and personal posts.
- Blog of Rugrats: Journaling my life with my kids, and Down syndrome.
- Cross Stitch for Free: Niche site for cross stitching patterns and needlework fun.
- Medium.com/@webgrrrl: For content I deem worthy of reading by a wider, more intelligent audience, ha-ha! You’ll notice how sparse that blog is, then.
For now, I’m not putting any specific target number of posts on any of my sites. I first need to make sure that I make the time to blog! That’s the most important thing for me to focus right now. Win the small battles first.
Together with this strategy, I’ll curate updates on all of my blogs in the WebGrrrl.net Facebook page. Nope, this is not my personal Facebook page. I finally got a reason to create one that is dedicated to my blogs. I’ll possibly switch or add a Google+ page as my curation centre, because of better organic traffic coming in as a result of better SEO exposure, but I’ll see how this goes.
So there you have it. That’s how I’m going to deal with my blogging activities this year.
What about you? Have you abandoned your blog? Do you have any strategy to get back into form?
Check out my other posts: « What an awesome year / Migrating a single WordPress site to a multisite »