Blogging … Remember that? Before social media and twitter, people would go forth to blogger.com, or some other platform and commit thoughts to pen and paper (or keyboard and screen). There were mommy bloggers, sports blogs, personal blogs e.g. Did you see my latest blog post?
Alas, that era is over. A few really big blogs sucked much of the Oxygen out of the ecosystem and trends toward micro and image posting, won the day, read as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Tumblr was a great transition between blogging and social media and was purchased by Yahoo for $1 billion but was recently re-sold for just a few million. Maybe I could have been in the triple comma club!
Zombie blogs
As part of my work as the Editor of SQLShack, we would look for zombie blogs. These were blogs that had been active, then became inactive and were just sitting there. Occasionally, we’d offer to buy all of the content and re-post it with author attribution. This was the only opportunity for these articles to really ever see the light of day again, as zombie blogs slowly die over time.
I marveled at the wasted time and effort, to start build something only to stop and then let it fall into obscurity.
One non-technical blog I found was this guy, with 6 kids, who was posting about his off the grid farm. He would sometimes make 8-10 posts a day. They were usually just images with captions. Then his posting slowed. Then he skipped a month or two. His final post was something akin to “I’m sorry for failing as a husband and a father. I let my pride ruin everything”. Ta da! Wow, how depressing. This huge body of work, concluded with a literary suicide note.
I have my own zombie blog – here it is “The fighting CEO“. I’m trying to cannibalize some of the remaining content, then I do hope to put a bullet in this zombie’s head.
Failure is inevitable
All political careers, affairs and … blogs end in failure
Does Bob Dylan still write new songs? Did John Edwards affair and illicit love child propel him to the presidency of the United States? Is Mommy blogging still a thing?
So do all political careers, affairs and … blogs end in failure? And if so, why the Hell would you create one?
Bear in the woods
But it gets worse. Even before your blog will inevitably die, hopefully with a less melodramatic and depressing swan song than that off-the-grid guy, nobody will read it. Here is the news flash. Nobody cares about your ideas, opinions, thoughts, musings etc. Content is very segmented so people can drill down to exactly what they are interested in and learn from people 100x smarter and better at writing than you. Also, people have very short attention spans. They want to just read a tweet that might lead to an abbreviated summary article on Axios. Nobody has time for reading long, blog posts anymore.
If a bear growls in the woods, but nobody hears it, did it growl at all? So, if nobody reads your blog, are you even blogging?
Reasons to blog
I blog, therefore I am
Ok we know your blog will eventually fail and long before it does, you will come to the realization that nobody will ever read it. So why on God’s green earth, would you ever spend the time and energy to blog?
Exercise for the mind
For the same reason that all lives end in death, but yet, while we are alive we still nurture our body with exercise. Blogging for the mind is like cardio or weight training for the body. It can help us organize our thoughts, clear our minds, document what we’ve learned and help us to build a more well thought out and focused life, both professionally and personally.
Consistency
Blogging is also a way to enforce discipline and consistency in your life. I used to tell people I went to the gym 5x a week until I pulled my records on Snapfitness website and saw it was often as little as 2 some weeks. It isn’t so easy to inflate your statistics with blogging. It is there for you to see. If you are consistent with blogging, you may be consistent with other things. Same as if you aren’t. When you fail, you can look back at your zombie-blog as a testament to your ability to follow through and stay on task. It will remain there, mocking you until you either re-constitute it with new content or delete it.
Free therapy
Waste money on therapy? Bug your local bartender? Dump on your wife, friends, pets etc? Save yourself some money and your loved ones the time, commit your thoughts to paper
Occasionally, we can purge our frustrations and negative thoughts into a medium where we can be sure it is safe from ever being discovered, let alone read! Unless you are harboring really terrible thoughts like Creed-Thoughts from ‘The Office”, what is the harm?
Alternatives to a blog site
Setting up a physical website, domain, getting a WordPress theme etc. (like this one) is all overkill unless you are sure you are going to blog and will likely be a waste of time and money, especially if it turns into a Zombie blog. Instead, you can piggyback on existing sites like DZone, CodeProject for technology or the ubiquitous Medium. Your content will live on for years in a robust platform, long after you’ve stopped writing. And nobody will even know you stopped.
Note: Medium may pay you as much as 18 cents or sometimes even more for your efforts, so if you write a few million blog posts, you could even make a living there!
Summary
So blog, don’t blog – nobody cares but yourself. But you are the most important reason to, and really all that matters.