If you are in a good mood, time for some depressing truth, yay! In this blog post, we will look at why blogging was a bad idea now that I have been doing it for a couple of months.
For all the aspiring bloggers out there, please don’t take this post as discouraging proof to drop your dreams. For the successful bloggers out there, please don’t take this post as a whining of an unseasoned blogger who couldn’t get his act together.
This post serves as an example of what not to do and how not to do it. Since all my efforts were all for naught, I should share it with you so that you don’t have to waste yours.
Table of Content
Are there any benefits of blogging?
Before I reveal why blogging turned out to be a disaster for me, let me tell you why I started the ball rolling and got into all this.
Why did I start blogging?
A fresh start
I’m an erratic guy who does random things pretty much aimlessly. A blog was something on my radar as well.
I always feel like doing something new until it bores me and moves on to the next one. Like dating now that I look at it.
I had some free time and was looking for ways to kill it and then thought why not start a blog? At that point, it looked like all my life choices formed a constellation and pointed unanimously at blogging.
Conceiving the idea of starting something new is exhilarating. In the heat of that moment, I didn’t think too much about the negatives and dived straight into it.
Diversification
I’m not a specialist, I’m a generalist. The idea of doing the same thing for a lifetime is revolting to me.
I have been working as an embedded system engineer, and that singular identity was nagging me.
I wanted a new identity.
Also, from a financial perspective, diversifying your incoming sources is crucial for stability.
So I wanted a new income source and identity.
Blogging seemed an easy start and went for it.
Serendipity
I was hearing a lot of podcasts and starting a blog was an idea that was hammered into my brain from them.
They talked about how the internet provided an opportunity for global sharing and how much you will miss out on your chance for serendipity if you stay away from the internet.
At that point, proving value to others seemed like a straightforward decision and the obvious thing to do.
Building an audience
I was fascinated by the lifestyles of authors, and podcasters, and bloggers who all have an audience base. They all talked about the value of having an audience base and providing value to them.
Blogging was an attempt to build my audience base.
Second brain
The second brain concept got me wrapped up and had started my Notion setup for all my workflows. I was documenting a lot of things in my life, the books I read, the ideas I had. It felt sad that these are not being made public.
I was documenting it anyway, so if I could make it publicly available. There was more value in the work and more satisfaction.
The blog provided me an opportunity to share the things that otherwise would be lockup in my laptop.
It wants to read more above with a more creative overlay. Click to read my post on Why I started a blog?
Why blogging was a bad idea?
Now that you know the background details. Let’s have a reality check and see how blogging has turned out for me.
Blackhole for my time
The first thing I noticed is that I have no time left. I’m always short on time.
I have set myself a target of publishing two blog posts, which I have successfully failed.
When you have a full-time 9 to 6 (and beyond) job like I do, the few hours of the day that you are left with if spend on blogging is so exhausting.
I’m a very slow writer. I take forever to write a blog post. When I fed all the remaining time to my blog after feeding my daily job, it left me with nothing.
With my current writing at a snail’s pace, there is no way for me to make it work out or sustain.
Currently, I have lowered my article quality very low and stopped giving much thought to how impressive the post is. I just focus on finishing the article and doing it fast.
This often results in substandard quality materials.
If you could write a blog post in like 3 hours or fewer. I think you will be fine. Otherwise, it would be a Blackhole for your time.
Writer’s block
This is the most prominent problem you will come across when you blog.
You need to publish blog posts regularly every week and you will most often run out of ideas.
This results in you being in a confused clueless state most of the time.
Your struggle as a blogger will always be about finding new and new content to write about so that your audience won’t run out of content.
As a writer, you would want to write about things that you are truly passionate about or would be a ground-breaking insight. When you write every week, be sure as hell that you won’t find passionate content every week.
As a blogger, prepared yourself to write about things simply because you have nothing else to write about.
I’m not Shakespeare
I have written twenty-something blog posts at this point and I can say with certainty that I’m a terrible writer. My initial thought was, my writing would get better as I write more and more posts. But I have to say, I don’t see any kind of progress. It feels as if it is getting deteriorated because of the word fatigue I get.
Every post is a reminder of how bad my writing is and that is a sad reality.
No viewership
This is a blessing and a curse.
A blessing because you can write whatever you want out of the confidence that no one will read it. This is the big reason I could write all these blog posts without thinking too much about it.
The reason it is bad is obvious. No one is reading what you are writing. This makes you question what is the point of all this effort?
This makes you think, should I stop now so that you could at least save the time you have now?
Financial liability
I don’t think I will ever make any profit from this blog but sadly running a blog has its price to pay.
You don’t need a balance sheet to figure that this is a financial liability.
For me either I should migrate to a free website or I should have enough audience to generate ad revenue to meet the operating cost.
How to succeed as a blogger?
SEO
If you do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your blog post then your blog post will get indexed at the search result from which you can derive an audience.
This means that with no other promotion you will have significant traffic. But the catch is that SEO optimized blog post is dissatisfying as a writer. Doing SEO optimization will cause some drastic changes to your post and you probably won’t appreciate the changes.
I don’t think the audience appreciates the SEO-optimized post as well.
But this is the best way to get traffic into your blog.
Great content and impressive network
Another option you have is to produce great content.
When you produce great content, there will be a demand for it and there will be organic sharing for it.
This organic sharing will drive traffic to your website.
The root cause my things didn’t work out for me is because I met none of the above criteria.
Are there any benefits of blogging?
Of course, nothing can be all bad, there have to be some benefits somewhere.
I found one benefit of blogging even when my blog failed.
Personal development
There is so much to learn and discover when you blog. For me, blogging wasn’t a simple journey but there is so much that I pick up along the way.
Because of blogging, I learned the basics of the internet, how to build a website, how to write an article. Now that I write about whatever I consume, I have a record of it, better retention of it, and a more critical analysis of it.
Blogging has given me a lot of opportunities to grow, and that is the benefit of blogging.
Wrap Up
Through this very depressing blog post, we have looked at why did I blog, what are the downsides and upsides of blogging that I have experienced so far.
I hope that you find this blog post as a source to what not to do to have a successful blog.
Never back out if you have a plan to blog.