Lessons Learned After 6 Years Of Blog Writing

January 15, 2021 Daily FINANCE & TECH Comments Off on Lessons Learned After 6 Years Of Blog Writing
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Surprise! It’s been exactly six years since I started my journey to financial independence and started writing this blog (though I only took it public July 2018). Today I want to celebrate by reflecting on anything new I’ve learned in the last year since my 5 year anniversary post. 

As background, this is by far the longest time I have consistently done anything – and I mean anything. A job, a school, a hobby – anything 🙂 . So let’s get into why that might be, what I’ve learned, what’s changed, and answer a few reader questions as well!

What I’ve Learned

Blogging Is Way More Than Writing

Let’s start with a depressing truth that I had no idea about when I started this blog six years ago 🙂 . I thought blogging involved banging some words into a computer and pressing publish because that’s exactly what I did for years before taking this blog public. A private blog is exactly that – basically an online journal with nothing else involved.

Well it turns out that public blogging is a completely different beast. It involves writing, editing, photography, photo editing (or choosing stock photos), technical stuff and (if its monetized) advertising and affiliate challenges. Not to mention talking to your wonderful readers, which can be in the form of responding to comments or tweets, Instagram comments, DMs and Facebook messages.

On a related note, if you want, blogging can also involve posting on all of the social media sites I just mentioned. All this to say, it’s way more than just writing and the list of things blogging involves, can be infinite. I just included a list of the bits I’ve chosen to engage with above 🙂 .  So that was a huge misconception that I had, but let’s flip it on its head:

Blogging Is What You Make It

The positive side of the above is that you can do whatever you want on and around a blog. I’ve done this in that this blog and my social media accounts, are a catch all for all my random interests that never previously had a home. I used to post film reviews on Tumblr to an audience of 1, write restaurant reviews on my personal Facebook and send random thoughts into the Twitterverse.

Well now, that all is concentrated within my blog efforts (sorry, not sorry 😉 ). For example, I post film and food reviews on my Instagram (like the below) and finally have an outlet for all the book quotes I highlight on my Kindle (I post them on Twitter).

Luckily, I’ve heard from several people that they enjoy these seemingly random posts. I can now concentrate all the things I love doing, into one hobby because blogging is what you make it.

It can be anything you want. You don’t have to stay in your lane if you don’t want to and I feel very grateful that I discovered this about blogging. I now have an outlet for all the things that were previously bursting out of me without a home 🙂 .

Blogging Is A Long Game Skill

I saw a challenge on Instagram recently where artists re-do a drawing they created years earlier and after seeing those drawings side-by-side, I was struck by how much their craft had improved (though it was still good to begin with). This made me realize: We’re all still growing.

I may look at an artist or a blogger and think, “Damn! I wish I was as good as them!” but I’m not just comparing my starting point to someone else’s middle or end point, but I’m also not acknowledging that we all continue to get better if we work at something.

I think my writing has improved a lot since my first few posts. They are embarrassingly still up on this site and I will keep them up to hopefully give that same ah-ha moment to others (just as these Instagram artists gave me) and also to give an honest account of my journey (writing and financial independence-wise).

These are the words I wrote at that time of my life and changing them to be more polished (or orderly…or clear 😉 ) seems disingenuous to me. The point of this blog is to catalog my journey, in all of its unclear and chaotic glory 😉 .

Similar to improving a writing skill in general, I think blogging is also a skill that gets better with time and me thinking that it was static and that I’m either good or bad, was silly of me. I think I’m better at this now, than I was six years ago, and I (hopefully) will be even better six months from now. There is no end-point to growing skills, just constant improvement and that’s exciting to me 🙂 .

Blogger Burnout Is Legit

I had never experienced blogger or writer burn out until I attempted (and won!!!) NaNoWriMo this November. That was by design, since I chose my weekly posting schedule based on how often I had produced blog posts the previous year. It was an anti-schedule in the same way my budget is actually an anti-budget based on my averages from the previous year.

Well, now I’ve felt that white hot heat of burnout creeping onto me and I’m happy it occurred at the end of me basically being on a writing frenzy, that then allowed me to take a bit of a break from writing. My writing stores were almost depleted and they needed some days (or maybe weeks 😉 …) of napping and reading and recuperating to get back to full capacity.

I was curious when I attempted that challenge, if I would even be able to do it since I only usually write when I feel inspired to do so – and that feeling does not emerge on any type of schedule 🙂 . Some weekends I would write 3 full posts and others would involve a 0 word count.

I can’t predict what my creative juices are going to do, but it’s good to know that they can be wrangled a little bit. After almost a month of writing more than I basically ever have before, it was only at the end that the words stopped flowing naturally, and that might have been partially because of the stress of seeing that big deadline looming only days away.

So, I can now personally confirm that burnout, even from a hobby, is legit. Let’s see what other silly things I confirm during the rest of my retirement 🙂 .

I Still Don’t Want To Write A Book

A few people have been asking me to write a book. One is actually a publisher and another works with a literary agent they think I would get along with. I’ve also heard from several readers that they would like me to take on a book endeavor. And even though I am deeply flattered that anyone would want to read my words in a more permanent format, I don’t currently want to do it 🙂 .

I’ve joked that I never say never…except about having kids 🙂 . But, similarly to how helping care for my baby cousin for 3 weeks even further solidified my decision to not have kids, NaNoWriMo only further entrenched my desire to not write a book.

Writing with a deadline was difficult enough, even though I chose to do it 😉 . Adding all the things that publishing a book requires, like editors and sales pressure and the constant marketing needed to make back a book’s advance, on top of writing on a deadline, sounds like a nightmare to me.

It sounds like the opposite of fun and I’m all about fun at this point in my life 🙂 . I’m curious if years of retirement will later change my mind on this front and make me welcome such a challenge, but this is where I stand for now.

Answering Your Questions

I asked on Twitter and Instagram if y’all had any questions for me and here’s what I got back:

How do you blog? Do you draft on paper, on your site? How do you get ideas?

I try to write my stream of consciousness thoughts in Evernote. I have the app on my phone and my computer. Writing there is easier than writing on paper and then transcribing it into WordPress. Once I have enough rough sentences that explain what I want to talk about, I paste them into WordPress and write the actual sentences there 🙂 .

However, some ideas are more visual and I need to put pen to paper, so then I do use a notebook and then transfer the info into WordPress. WordPress is where I write my official drafts though. Evernote and paper are just for vague thoughts.

My ideas just come to me – sometimes at inopportune times, like when I’m trying to drift off to sleep 🙂 . Other times, it’s sparked by a reader asking me a question and realizing other people might have the same query and benefit from the answer. At times, a thought comes to me when I’m washing dishes or staring at the sky while lounging outside – they come at random times and I try to write them down in Evernote immediately before they drift away.

Luckily, I have never been hard pressed for ideas. I have over a hundred drafts in my WordPress and lots of ideas in my project management platform Asana. If I have just a general post idea, I put it as a title, along with my other ideas there that I keep sorted by category in a visual fashion – it helps me keep everything organized in my mind. This is what that looks like:

What’s the best platform to get started blogging?

Like I mentioned, I blog through WordPress and have Bluehost as my hosting provider because they were the cheapest. I chose the cheapest option because I didn’t know if I’d like blogging publicly, so I was hedging my risk, but I regret that decision now.

The one thing a host is supposed to do in my eyes, is stay up, and my site goes down monthly because of Bluehost. I’ve discussed it with them multiple times and there’s been no solution, so if I continue to blog after October 2021 (when I’m reassessing blogging’s role in my retirement), I’ll switch hosts to a much more expensive, but reliable solution.

What would you still do the same or what would you change on your journey?

I’m on the fence about this one. I ask myself “Would I have taken the blog public sooner? Would I have stopped lurking on social media sooner?” I think the answer to the former is no and the latter is yes.

I think writing the blog for 3.5 years privately helped me figure out my voice and grow and not be overwhelmed with learning to FIRE and blog at the same time. I usually tackle one new skill at a time. I did this with FIRE, then keto, and then blogging, which I think has helped me to not get overwhelmed with multiple things and give up as a result.

Does blogging provide you income?

Some? Yes. Enough to make a serious impact on my finances or make me rich? Fuck no 🙂 . This is especially true when the dollars are translated to dollars per hour. For example, see this tweet from August:

I broke everything down in my annual income post here, but over the last six years, I’ve earned $0.26 a hour from this blog. And that amount does not account for all the time I spend on social media 😉 or other blog-related things – just the time I was writing the actual posts. If I factor everything that goes into the blog into this calculation, I suspect I’m making like a penny an hour – you know, life changing stuff 🙂 .

Conclusion

And that’s it! I’ve promised that I’ll continue writing weekly until my 1 year retirement anniversary in October. After that, I’ll reassess the place blogging has in my life, but based on how I feel right now, I’m hopeful that I’ll want to keep writing and will celebrate many blog anniversary milestones with y’all to come 🙂 . Thank you so much for being here 🙂 !

What’s a hobby that you’ve done for many years?