I began blogging in 2006. At that point in time, blogging was a fairly well-known thing…but it was not nearly as popular as it is today.
When I started blogging, it was actually a free Blogger blog that I was using to keep our friends and family up to date about our newest addition to the family — a Newfoundland puppy. After just a few months, I started to notice that people I didn’t know were actually visiting the blog through search engines and starting to leave comments. And I started to wonder what could possibly be so interesting to people that we didn’t know about our lives with this crazy dog.
But that’s the thing about blogging. Many people start blogging to share their story with others who have been in the same position or can empathize with what is happening in their lives. And others blog as a way to clear their head of things, chronicle events or otherwise just get over something that is going on in life. And then there are the blogs that do both of things, but actually teach you something in the process. They may help you discover something about yourself or how to do or make something…but these blogs which entertain while teaching are typically the blogs that create large numbers of followers and stick around for years and years.
In the past 6 years, there is a lot I learned while blogging and from reading the blogs of others. Sure there are some bloggers who just write about life and the curveballs it throws us that are wildly popular for no particular reason at all (like dooce, which is entertaining but also doesn’t really say much at the same time). And there are some blogs that are all teaching. But the blogs that I tend to keep in my Google Reader that I enjoy going back to time after time are usually blogs that blend the personal elements of their life smoothly into the teaching aspect. You not only get to know the author but can also learn from them as well.
Ask Yourself This
The question really is: who are you hoping to reach with your blog and what do you want to achieve in the long term?
If you want long-lasting impact, you need to not only find the voice and writing style which allows you to best speak to your audience, but also establish the balance that lets someone walk away knowing more than they did before they started reading your blog.
When I began blogging, I was writing mostly for myself and people I knew. So the visitors I had to the blog learned very little from my posts — and that is definitely something I notice now when I look back at my old posts. In fact, it’s a great idea to go back to your old posts from time to time to see if they are really worth having on your site anymore. If they don’t say anything worthwhile or add any value to your blog, you have two choices:
- turn it into a post worth reading and republish it as new or updated
- delete it
That’s really all there is to it.
