Improving Your Blog

I seem to be on a kick about blogging.  I’m not sure how that happened but I might as well go with the flow.  At least for a day or two.

I’m not a sports person.  That doesn’t mean I don’t notice some of what’s going on with sports and sports companies.  The Nike slogan that had been popular for a long while “Just Do It”  has a definite blog application, you know. In a world where people are obsessed with excellence, and with how they are judged by others, the admonition to just do it is a strange anomaly.

The idea that it doesn’t matter whether you are great or not is completely out of sync with the ubiquitous messages that bombard.  And yet for most of the world — for the average among us — we are not going to be the best, the fastest or the highest and anything and yet we still want to participate. We want the thrill of doing — and we deserve it.  Enjoyment is not the domain, exclusively, of those who are excellent at an activity.  Anyone can enjoy what they do.  Duh.

Blogging is just another of those things that we can enjoy for the simple joy of doing it. We don’t have to be great at it.  We don’t have to amaze others.  We don’t have to amass thousands of readers who rave at the power of our words.  All we have to do is sit down and do it.  Whether we write a journal, or type our blog, it is — and should be — the very act of doing so that is it’s own reward.

Those who blog to make money fall into another category.  If you are writing primarily to supplement your income with something you can do at home when you’re done with your nine-to-five job I suppose it’s perfectly OK for you to be obsessed with how many readers you have.  But I wonder whether, if your prime directive is to maximize your profit whether you really care about what you are writing — you care about whether others will read and respond to your words.  I do believe there is a difference. Both can produce equally eloquent text, but the content will differ, I am sure of it. In one case you are listening to yourself; in the other you are seeking approval from others.

Why do we obsess about how well we are doing? Why does approval matter so much? First of all, it doesn’t need to matter.  A blog like this WordPress blog doesn’t have to cost you a thing; there are no standards that must be applied — other than some sense of decency which in 2019 has almost zero meaning as almost everything seems to be allowable.  Many blogs can be set to public or private — so you don’t have to let anyone else see what you are saying.  Blogs that are public can often be set so that they don’t show up in search engines — if you are shy and don’t want it to be too easy for people to find you.  It’s possible to have a private place to play around with blogging, you just have to investigate the options already out there.

To live a creative life,

we must lose our fear

of being wrong.

–Joseph Chilton Pearce

The biggest thing, to me, is just accepting that your blog can be anything you want it to be.  And if you change your mind about what you want it to be there’s no reason you have to stick with what you started — you can change course in mid-stream — I’ve done it several times — or you can erase the whole thing (make yourself a copy first using the platform’s download feature) and pretend tomorrow’s post is your first post ever.  You can have multiple blogs for different subjects; and no one is going to care if you write every day, or every week, or once a year; there are no arbitrary rules about keeping your blog alive.  I have a couple other blogs I haven’t touched in quite a while and they are sitting there like patient pets just waiting for me to smile in their direction.  {fortunately they don’t need to be fed. 🙂 }

The bottom line is don’t think about how good your blog is, just blog.  Just write.  Just express yourself.  Practice makes perfect — and whether or not you ever have a popular blog — the simple process of doing it over and over again will make the process easier — familiar — normal.

I like to think that choosing topics to write about also becomes easier.  The process of putting down topic after topic after topic over a long period of time has a way of making each post less of a “major monument” and more of a little ant hill.  The regularity of writing shrinks the decision about topic and inflates the joy of composing, editing, fine tuning.  When you aren’t obsessing about the big decisions you are enabled to enjoy the little ones for what they are:  the processes of life.

I haven’t really told you how to improve your blog — I never intended to.  But what I have shared — I hope — is helping you improve your desire to blog.  Sometimes if we strip away our excuses we find our true purpose.