Is Blogging Dead?

Blogging is your foundation, but it's like building a house without a roof

Perhaps I’m late to the game and I’m writing about something that the rest of you have known for a long time. This is a blast from the past. It’s a fossil from the early days of the internet when writers could make their way with crude clubs and stone tools.

I’m talking about BLOGGING!

More specifically, I want to explore whether or not blogging has gone extinct.

Late to the game

Come to think of it, I’m always late to the game. By the time I started a blog, other bloggers had already landed movie contracts based on their daily musings. Then again, I’m always mistrustful of those kind of stories. They seem, to me, to be a false veneer to hide some predetermined transfer of wealth.

I think there was a story about a woman who turned a cooking blog into a film staring Amy Adams. See? In order for your blog to be profitable, you can’t write about your arduous life struggling with abject poverty. Nobody wants to discover people like that and help them out with a windfall. In order to succeed in blogging, you had to be pretty comfortable already (that might be true of all things).

My Peru blog

It was around 2008 that I started up a blog about my life in Lima, Peru. My objective was to do a daily post that included a picture and anywhere between 500-1000 words. I used quite a bit more profanity in my writing in those days. I still enjoy reading articles like that from time to time. There’s a certain flow state that can be achieved by rage ranting. It’s fun to read the work that comes out of that.

It was easy to get the pictures. I carried a camera around with me, a good camera not some piece of trash that comes installed on your cell phone. Walking through the streets, I always saw something interesting. My idea was to chronicle a different life than most people will ever experience.

The blog was sabotaged

What always seems to happen with me is that my work expands to a certain level and then somebody or something manages to shut off progress. I hit 30,000 views in the first month, but then growth stopped and I more or less lingered there forever.

I had a nice email list and I developed a pocketful of advertisers. At my peak, I was making around $1,000 a month on my blog. That was going on while I was starting a business, so it provided me with cash revenue during the first lean years.

But then the advertisers dried up. By then I had already moved back to the US, so I was working off memories and pictures. My life was changing, I’d gotten married, I’d had children, and my daily musings about life in Lima lost the immediacy that had made it interesting.

It was a valuable experience

Even though it wasn’t the path to fortune, there was extreme value to the time I spent blogging. I held myself to the standard of writing a daily post for close to a decade. Yes, there were times that I’d sit down and do a week’s worth of posts over the weekend. There were times that I mailed it in. Even so, it is enormously valuable to get into a habit of writing daily.

Well... it’s valuable and problematic.

Don’t get too comfortable

The thing about blogging is that you get into a habit of cranking things out. That’s good. You need to learn to let your fingers fly over the keyboard. But writing is more than just producing 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 words and calling it good. You need to have some direction, blogging tends toward stream of consciousness. I don’t think you’re able to achieve personal breakthroughs unless you put yourself through some discomfort every now and then.

I look back on the blogging era with nostalgia. There were all these delightful new publishing toys littering the landscape. My blogs, of course, were all on blogspot. I always gravitate to the less popular of two items. But this was before Facebook, so the internet was still wide open.

Blogspot

Blogspot used to have a landing page were you could just sit and flip through people’s blogs like the pages of a magazine. It was gloriously random. Today, it’s so much harder to find honest content. Everything is digitally picked based on what is perceived to be most beneficial to advertisers. Your preferences, other than what you’re likely to spend money on, rarely enter into the equation.

The tools were simple. Publishing a post was like sending an email. I didn’t think much about SEO or quality titles or any of that. Mainly I told my students that my blog was a good place to practice their English. They liked reading my affectionate observations about Peru.

We were all just delighted with blogs. But today everybody has a static web page with links to their books and social media. Blogs just don’t do what they used to do. People don’t rely on search engines anymore, they land on articles through social media feeds.

The mentality of pure creation

To some extent, I continue to use a modified form of the blogger mentality. I like to get up and write every day. However, lately I’m making a shift to more deliberate storytelling. Actually, this newsletter is the closest I come to straight blogging.

Blogging is fine if readers recognize that the work is intended to be somewhat frivolous. The problem is that the trend of the internet is to take everything seriously.

You have to be very careful about opening your mouth when you’re not sure what’s going to come out.

Take time to wrestle with the problem

These days I find myself more inclined to gnaw on difficult social problems. I find that it requires a certain amount of trickery to get people to even consider these problems. That means, you have to disguise them in well-crafted personal narratives so people get caught up in the story before they even realize the point you’re trying to make.

Better yet, make them think the point of your article was their idea.

Writing articles like that does not follow the same process as blogging. Here’s an example.

Find a distraction

I’m also slowed down because lately I feel a need to dabble in cartoons. I like the look of watercolor paintings. Something about watercolor relaxes me. I also find that staring at a computer screen all day ruins my creative flow state. I need digital breaks. I need a moment when I’m occupied and my hand isn’t itching to grab my phone (we’re all digital addicts aren’t we?).

When I sit down to sketch or paint, my brain gets restored and I can go back to quality writing after that. So, the cartoons serve a dual purpose. Creating them simply delays the writing process and gives me time to go back and edit my articles a few more times.

Don’t fumble at the goal line

Ultimately, there’s an enormous difference between a good solution and the best solution. Blogging tends to be slapdash. I don’t mean to be condescending because I think freewriting is a vital and important part of the process. If you’re delighted by blogging, then you should keep on blogging. You’ll occasionally catch lightning in a bottle.

Who am I to be critical about blogging? I’ve been doing it for 15 years!

I’m just saying you have to look for ways to elevate your lightning capture rate.

Evolution

I’m fortunate that I lived through a period where blogging was the rage. I wish it was still there like a minor league where future writers can get their feet wet. But blogging is gone for the most part. I don’t think you can make any money blogging anymore (although you could never make a huge amount of money, so maybe that’s irrelevant).

Being a writer means that you have to experience various forms of evolution. Your audience will evolve. Technology will evolve. Finally, you will evolve. The focus of blogging is daily production. That’s important. At some point, your perspective has to shift. It’s not enough to produce something, you have to produce breakthroughs.

Okay, but how?

These days, I’m most delighted in my own writing when I come up with a little twist in perspective that has positive applications to my daily reality. It can be something small. In fact, small breakthroughs can have a resounding ripple effect. Writing is like handing out eyeglasses to the world. If a reader picks up your work and is able to see the world more clearly, you’ve done something wonderful.

I’m not convinced that the blogger mentality can achieve those breakthroughs with any consistency. The blogger mentality gets you close, but once the text is written, you have to wrestle with it for a while. The amazing thing is that sometimes you can turn a good article into something great just by adding a line or two. The secret is allowing yourself to take the time to look for the revelation.

“Look” is the wrong word. I’m talking about the kind of thing that you can’t find by looking. Everybody’s had the experience of trying to recall something only to have the information perpetually dance out of their grasp.

What’s the name of that actor?

What was the name of the street where my best friend used to live?

Where did I leave my keys?

When you’re too fixated on drawing up information, it’s like you short circuit your brain. The trick is to stop thinking about it. The moment you stop thinking about it, your brain digs up the answer and throws it at you out of the blue.

Discovery vs revelation

With blogging, I feel as if you line up all the bits of evidence. Blogging is like the discovery process, but in order to write something great, you have to actually achieve the answer. That requires you to flip the script.

Start as a writer, then view your work as a reader, then go back to being a writer. It’s a complete change of direction. Do this slowly or you’ll get whiplash.

You can accelerate this process by fixating on something pleasant that shifts the focal point of your thinking: like doing a quick watercolor painting.

Give us a little more

There are so many writers out there that give us 90% of a great article, but don’t take the time at the end to invert the process in order to cross the finish line. Now, I don’t mean to sound like I regard blogging with contempt. I have a deep affection for blogging. I enjoy reading the work of writers who blaze with the joy of pure creation. I’m confident writers like that will rise to the occasion to the point where, someday, they’ll give us just a little bit more.

Sometimes I feel like I’m becoming a very old man lecturing young people on the path they’re going to follow. It’s really unfair to do that because the world is so much different now than it was when I was in my 20s and 30s. Back then writers could find their way by blogging.

Today, blogging is a lot tougher sell.

Blogging is your foundation. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of building a solid foundation. It’s just… don’t get so fixated on the foundation that you neglect to build the house.