Something happened a month and a half ago. I was in my bed, middle of the night, wide awake. I was desperately trying to get to sleep but my mind was racing with all sorts of thoughts. I didn’t have work the next day so it sleep wasn’t critical but I wanted to wake up early for the next day.
I keep thinking about this blog. All that this blog has been through and the experiences I’ve gone through while writing it. Bittersweet.
In April 2013, the spring semester of my freshman year of college, after several months of delay, I started this blog. It began on the free WordPress.com platform with a template site design that makes me now cringe. This blog started as a creative outlet for me. I posted about college life, movie reviews, things I was reading, and career stuff since I was beginning my upper level public relations classes.
Having a space on the web to call my own, fascinated me. My first foray into websites and blogging happened in 2007 when I was 13. I built a free website on the webs.com platform (then called FreeWebs) and ran with it. Games, polls, reviews, and horrid graphic design covered the website.
My 13-year-old self loved having a website. The feeling stayed when I began this blog. Throughout college, this site was my rock, the one steady thing in a constant stream of change.
When I graduated college and started a full-time job, things changed slightly. My job was demanding and I had less time to devote to this site. Then my passion started to slip. The blogging world changed. Words like monetization, sponsorships, and business blogging became a regular recurring conversation. I looked at my site and felt weird about it.
What was my site’s focus or the ever elusive “niche” as business bloggers recommended? If you look through the archives, despite some being deleted, you will notice this site has gone through different phases: college, movie reviews, entertainment industry analysis, writing, personal finance, social media, and so forth.
Through the years of having my blog, I’ve seen several people around me start blogs then have them fade away a few months later. People would stop doing their blogs out of boredom, discovering blogging wasn’t for them, or entering a new phase in their life (in my age bracket’s case, that meant getting one’s first full-time job).
To be honest, I kind of did quit this blog for a while. From August to December of 2015, this site was kind of on auto-pilot. It would take me several days or a week to write one post and I would schedule posts that had been sitting in my drafts for months.
I struggled with creating content, trying to figure out the site design and the direction of this site.
Let me say something many people know but it’s worth repeating: blogs are hard to maintain.
I knew this and for a while I left blogging. Yet no matter how much I tried to walk away from it, my mind kept pulling me back to it.
Yes, blogs are hard to maintain. You have to do SEO, resize images, make graphics, get all the proper tags and keywords in place, create clever yet concise headlines, interact with other bloggers, write high-quality content…oh and do it while (usually) holding down a full-time job and a myriad of other responsibilities.
It’s hard work and sometimes I get exhausted from it but I kept coming back to it because even though it can be exhausting, I like it. I LOVE the blogging community (PF and Writing blogging peeps in particular!) and I love writing and sharing things.
Soooo where am I going with all of this?
Well, I’ve been running a new personal finance site for a month and a half now, Rebel with a Plan. It focuses on helping people master their money and rebel against the norm. Ah! I love writing for the site. My goal for the site is to make personal finance topics more approachable and not so intimidating. There is going to be some lifestyle stuff thrown in as well!
This site will still stay here and I will continue writing on this blog, albeit on a monthly basis or so. Having this site has been a joy but it’s just so awesome to stand behind something that really excites me. Something I learned while doing this site is I really like educating others on topics and I don’t like talking about myself too much. It isn’t some timid sort of thing, I just like having the focus be on something else.
Have you gone through a blogging rut in the past or recently? How do you keep the excitement alive while blogging? Let me know! Be sure to check out my new site! Rebel with a Plan.