Today I’m sharing a few blog posts I’ve loved recently.
I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging, writing and creativity. On my quest to write a novel, and it be imperfectly perfect, I’ve found it hard to avoid online distractions.
As my work (blog stuff) is basically on the internet and creative writing is on my laptop; temptation is waiting, just a click away. Lately, I’ve been feeling rather torn between the two things and these articles have really helped me.
Some weeks I’ve been on a roll with the first draft of the book. Other weeks its been like pulling teeth and I’m (as much as I hate to admit it) actively looking for a distraction.
The blogging world has changed so much since I first started back in 2010. Like many others, I’ve found a definite drop in visitors and other types of website stats over the last year, and to be honest, it’s great to know I’m not alone in this.
Many people are reading Instagram posts over blog content. Choosing to consume snippets of short-form content over long-form blog posts. I find that there is a definite difference in the age of my Instagram followers to the age of my blog readers. It’s easy to generalise, but the younger age group seem to prefer the shorter, snappier stuff, and the blog audience is more my own age, late thirties and early forties. This might say more about our lifestyles than our attention span, but it could easily be a mixture of both.
After tentatively sharing what I’ve been up to over the past few months I’ve realised that a lot of my contemporaries are branching out more and more from blogging. Going beyond the blog and using it as a stepping stone into something else, or the vehicle to help them get to their goal. On the flipside, some are realising that although they love blogging, they need more of a challenge and they are pivoting in a completely new direction, their blogs growing with them.
This is a huge topic and like most things in life, you adapt to survive. I won’t be giving up my corner of the web, but to be able to diversify and be open to getting out of my comfort zone is liberating.
I want to avoid distraction, yet don’t want to lose touch with my readers, my posse, my crew. So if I’m not around on social much please don’t think I’ve jacked it all in, I’m just running with the momentum of other stuff.
Without further ado, here are the brilliant and thoughtful posts;
Is Blogging Dying? (And haven’t they been saying this for years?) by A Bookish Baker. Helen has some fantastic and perceptive thoughts in this post including how people consume content now and the fact we might be competing with ourselves.
Why Abandoning Your Blog for Social Media is a Huge Mistake by Catherine from Not Lamb. It seems many are abandoning blogs to concentrate on social media, here’s why it’s not a good idea. Spoiler- you don’t own the content!
Why I Won’t Be Quitting My Blog by Elizabeth Dhokia discusses why her blog will always be her hub, her home online.
How to Avoid Distraction when you’re Striving for Personal or Professional Success by Natasha Denness. Natasha coached me during the last quarter of 2017 and it’s partly down to her that I’m now nearly halfway through a first draft. This post reminds me that we can all only do so much with the time we have and to be wise about how we use it, especially when you have a specific goal in mind.
Stay in Lane – How To Focus On Your Goals and Ignore Other’s Success by Elizabeth Dhokia. Elizabeth’s musings again! I love this post for sharing thoughts about comparison and how just because you are able to do something doesn’t mean you should. I had an idea for an ebook for most of last year. I’ve even written most of it and designed the front cover. I still might go back and finish it but after stepping away from it for a while I realised that it didn’t feel like me. It wasn’t the right path, my path.
And finally, I saw this thread on Twitter (I’m here btw), and I was planning to write a post about my feelings about blogging in 2018, and it spoke so loudly to me that I just had to include it here.
Screengrabbed with permission from Erin Loechner, you can see the original thread here but for those of you not on Twitter here you go. Erin blogs at Design for Mankind and has a book out called Chasing Slow
Apologies if this is super small, I’m hoping it’ll be fine!
PS- this post is rather rambling, so apologies for that! Hope you still find it interesting and useful.
PPS- I’m going to take the Easter school holidays off with the kiddo’s. So there will be a short break, have a good one, probably see you on Instagram!
susan earlam ~ horror author 
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