Blogging has taken a backseat in the world of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It is not that people do not read it is just that blogging is difficult to get any traction in such a noisy internet. For over eight years I have been plodding away on this blog and I have learned a few things.
- Blogger is for PC people, Wordpress is for Apple people and Squarespace is greatness
- Mailchimp is also greatness
- I might be able to build a larger audience if I used Adwords and/or better posts
- Shorter posts are read and shared more than longer ones
- People love lists
- Post titles matter a lot
- Images help
- Building an email list is very helpful to see what is "connecting"
- Post to Facebook and Twitter
Beyond the blogging specific stuff I have learned more about myself than I ever imaged. Perhaps the most important point of self discovery is how much I fear blogging. Specifically how much I fear putting thoughts on "paper" in a public way. I am not a great speller. I am not disciplined in writing and distracted often contributing to mistakes. I did not pick up the basic principles of sentence structure and am not sure what a preposition is. These errors are brought to my attention by someone with some consistency and no matter how much I try to be better I seem to plateau on ability. Each published post is laden with fear and trepidation that I often cloister up for weeks on end and don't write anything (that has happened more this year than any year so far).
Eight years later and I still fear blogging because of how it exposes so many of my insecurities and inadequacies. Blogging is a practice in humility and a practice that is most formative to me than other areas of my life (except parenting which is just a series of failed attempts to live into the very ideals that I want my children to live into).
I write this all to say that if you fear something about yourself and you want to "get over it" I am not sure that is the point. I believe the point of the fears in our lives is not to run from them or to "get over them" but to learn from them. Fears are some of the greatest gifts we can receive because they teach us more than we could ever imagine. If it is possible to embrace that which you fear, I would encourage you to do so. You may still fear it, but it will teach you something you need to know.