It’s not really blogging. Just a Word document with the words “blogging”.

There. Now that you’ve read the utterly clickbaity headline, it’s time for the blog post!

When I first started this blog, way back in the golden olden days of 2012, I had big wide-eyed dreams for what I would do now I was a blogger. A Blogger was a mystical, ethereal internet person; someone who wrote catchy online versions of personal diaries, albeit better edited and with a little less of the constant Does he/she like me? and the boring analysis of how much you hated P.E/Gym. I can’t really talk about that from experience: I was one of the diarists who started off January 1 expecting to become the next Adrian Mole—at least until I discovered no-one should aspire to be Adrian “Lo, The Flat Hills of my Homeland” Mole. By June or July, about the time where we’re at now, I’d be making up diary entries days afterward, trying to guess if I read K-Zone or played Sims 2 on PS2 all day. It didn’t really matter. I wasn’t meant to be a diarist.

But, back to that magical word: blogging. I first started on Webs and then moved over to WordPress due to its overall simplicity. I sat around for a while and thought of what to write before deciding on the topic of the day: Political Correctness Gone Mad. It wasn’t about writing—it was after that I turned to the generic writer blog posts about writer’s block, inspiration and the like. It was nice to write about stuff on the internet, even if people didn’t really read it. I didn’t expect lots of views; after all, the internet superhighway is full of so many people trying to get their words out, trying to tell us the same thing, and I expected moderate success. But I kept doing it because I enjoyed it. When writer’s block (funnily enough) set in, I was still able to open up my WordPress reader and belt out a post for you guys to peruse, like and enjoy. Four years later, and I’ve stuck to my New Year’s Resolution for 2014 and still write a blog post a month.

What sort of blogger are you?

Enough of my blather. What I’m trying to say is: Why do you blog? In the echo chamber of the internet, full of millions of constantly chattering voices screaming and vying for your likes, why do you do it? There’s so many voices drowned out by the constant storm of the web, and yet we still continue to add to it. That’s not a bad thing. Of course, there are a multitude of reasons to blog:

• You’re in an industry that requires you to have a platform to speak, i.e. aspiring author/author, game developer, artist, musician, public speaker.
• You just want to rant and rave like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. There’s always a demand for these types.
• You want the $$$megabuxx$$$. Plenty of bloggers, especially in the early days, have made a lot of money doing what they do. A teen magazine I read back in 2006 introduced me to the weird world of blogging, mainly with fashion bloggers on Blogger and musicians on MySpace who adopted the trend early.
• I don’t know. Whatever reason you want. Anyone can do it!

The thing is: Keep up that it! Most aspiring bloggers give up after a post or three. Even if you’re experience a bit of blogging fatigue, you don’t have to let it sink in (don’t let that sink in, that evil bastard!) and take over until your blog matches one of the thousands of disused and deactivated web accounts around. Nobody remembers the many men and women who give up. Make yourself [positively] memorable. Treat it like you would writer’s block (there’s that damn term again!):

Take a short break. Write in clickbait-style with plenty of gifs. Write about something completely unrelated to your usual topics. Post responses to Tommy Wiseau interviews and add your own unique perspective. Read other blogs. Waste a few hours on Twitter/Facebook/the latest and greatest book (mine is The Widow by Fiona Barton).

There’s a lot of positives to blogging, and they generally outweigh the negatives. Keep it up! At least you’ll have something to show to your future children/AI neighbours/alien life forms/look back on through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia.