According to many people, blogging is dead. Everyone has moved to social media. Your efforts are better spent creating content for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Maybe.
I was an early adopter of social media. Ironically, as everyone else got on board with social and shifted their attention there, I focused on publishing my work to my own self-hosted blog.
I just celebrated 5 years of daily blogging and am approaching 2,000 published pieces on my blog.
The attention I’ve put on my own blog caused me to back away from social, because it’s been hard to focus on more than one channel at a time.
There are many reasons why I believe in the future of blogging, in general. I’ll leave those for another time.
Today I want to share with you the best personal reason I’ve found for maintaining my own blog, and for the effort required to publish daily.
The best reason to publish a blog is not for what you can share with others, but what you’ll discover for yourself.
Once I publish a piece to my blog, I rarely go back to read it on the site itself. My general practice is to publish and move on. I don’t want to get weighed down by second thoughts and self-criticism over typos and missing commas.
On the rare occasion on which I do go back to the blog and click through to read something, I’m given a gift.
At the end of each piece, the WordPress algorithm (or some plug-in I have installed, I’m honestly not sure how it works) shows me other essays related to the one I’m reading.
And through this function, I get to discover my past works that I’ve forgotten about. I get to see my trajectory of growth, and the evolution of my ideas.
It’s an algorithm that pulls only from my work.
In this way, my blog has become a tool for reminder and reflection.
It’s showing me the ideas and topics I’ve published that are related to each other.
At any given time, my mind is a swirl of various ideas and thoughts. I’ve tried every system possible for organizing my notes and ideas. None of them have worked for me because I never know what will be related to future ideas that I haven’t yet had in the present. My work isn’t linear.
I don’t tag my posts consistently. I mis-categorize things. I never quite know where to put something.
It turns out that I don’t really have to.
Now, with a high volume of work published, my blog has taken over that role.
Somehow, it organizes the chaos.
It reflects back my brilliance. It resurfaces things I may want to revisit.
It’s become the organizer of my mind that I’ve been seeking my entire life.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...