Is blogging still a thing?
Or should I just spend my time on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Instagram?
It’s taking me forever to wrap my head around the full picture of what an effective and comprehensive social media strategy should be for me and my business and my goals, and although I do know that each social media platform has its practical uses, and I actually enjoy using some of them (Pinterest and Instagram), I haven’t really come up with a system, and that frustrates me. In fact, I’m frustrated that I don’t really have a system for anything. There’s just too much and I am overwhelmed most of the time.
Blogging is something that has been on my to-do list every day for years. I keep feeling that it is something that would be useful to do…originally when I was living overseas and thought that my family and friends would like to see what I was up to, and now as documentation of my knitting/dyeing/spinning/making process, and as content marketing for my business. It makes sense to keep a blog. Will I have the willpower to keep it up, though, is the question.
I guess time will tell. It’s probably clear from the tone of this post that I’m not exactly doing backflips at the prospect of blogging regularly, but this time, instead of hyping it up and setting up an over-ambitious schedule, I’m just going to start wherever I am and see if I grow into it. No pressure, since that is one guarantee that I will eventually run away screaming.
Okay, so I’ll give blogging a whirl again, but what for? I don’t intend to go jump on the cheerful crafty blogger bandwagon. I don’t want to redesign the blog, bump up readership and have dozens of advertisers. I don’t imagine I even want to drive people to the blog or even increase the commenting on the blog. Does anyone other than me still use an RSS reader anyway? I do, but I don’t read whole blog posts any more; I just skim for relevant information. I don’t really expect any one to read my blog posts from beginning to end, either. I just need a place to hold my original content for linking, pinning, and sharing on other platforms. A place to write a little bit more about what I’m doing than will fit in an Instagram caption, or that I can link to for more information in my Etsy listings, or a picture and some related content that I can actually pin on Pinterest.
I want to use this blog for my own purposes, mostly. I want to use it to organize the information that I have that is currently jumbled up in a mixture of bookmarks, delicious links and Feedly “read laters”–for my own use, and to be able to share information that I have researched on a topic with others, by simply sending them a link. At the very least, email them a link to a recipe on my blog.
I also want to eventually use my blog (or create another) as a community-building tool, but for right now, I think I will also use it as a method of conversing with myself to get my thoughts clear on my goals and ideas. I am the type of person who needs to talk things through in order to be able to know what I really think about an issue…I like to verbally explore my thoughts on an issue in order to discover what I intuitively think about it. It’s hard to find people to talk to, though. So maybe if I do this process within a blog post, it will be like being able to give myself feedback.
Or I’ll just get more confused. We’ll see about that, too. I might even be able to get feedback from others–though I hope that happens in a more public forum. I’d love conversations to happen on Ravelry, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Maybe that will eventually grow from this blog.
Anyway, I’ll try to keep the blog posts about blogging to a minimum, and I’ll be jumpstarting this whole blogging thing again with a collaboration with a colleague on yarny-related issues. Doing a collaborative set of blog posts will definitely keep me motivated, and that will hopefully lead to a series of posts on catching up with my life since I stopped blogging–an overview of all the current aspects of my knitting and yarny business and my (possibly super boring?) life . I’m definitely not an expert, and I have no clue what I’m doing or where I’m going. I feel alone and overwhelmed most of the time, but I don’t want to dwell on that, though, neither do I want to pretend to be super peppy and perfect all the time. Maybe I can connect with other people stumbling along the same path as me by sharing some of my ideas and generating some conversations.
nikkislipp 