Since 1 year I try to write more blog posts. I’m performing at least 1 pomodoro per week to write drafts. I don’t feel pressure about publishing these drafts though, sometimes I do, sometimes I throw them away, and sometimes I merge them into a single post.
I think it might worth sharing what I learned.
Writing for yourself
The first rule of blogging is: don’t write for others, write for yourself. Some people might find what you write interesting, but writing with the goal to be interesting is not possible. It’s by writing consistently about your thoughts that some people might become regular readers. I stopped wondering if my posts were good or even interesting. I just published my current state of mind.
Writing for yourself is the art to express what you think about, in a clear way. It is a useful journey by itself, a personal experience. Having readers is a pleasant side effect for our ego, not the goal.
Writing in English
I don’t think it’s mandatory, still I don’t regret this choice.
Mainly because It improves my English skills.
But also, according to WordPress, I published 28 blog posts for 6500 unique reader. Half of them are not from France. I have some readers in the UK, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Poland and US for example.
It’s a wonderful gift to have feedback from all over the world, and only an English blog allows that. As you see my English is far from perfect, but it’s enough to share and learn with the whole world.
What I learned (in no specific order)
- Not technical topics like hiring process, work-life balance and remote working are controversial.
- Genders we use do matter.
- I publish only half of what I write.
- I’m never satisfied by what I publish.
- The final post is always far from what I aim at first.
- Coding and writing have lots of similarities, both are hard.
- Some people you admire might read and even comment your blog.
- In 1 year on a little blog, there are 59 432 attempt to post spam comments (Fun fact, I tried to manage them manually at first).
Just blog it
I enjoyed writing to my blog this year. I feel much more comfortable since I write for myself rather than for others. I’m not bilingual, and don’t need to, even to write in English.
I hope this post will help some of you to enjoy writing on their blog as well.
Thanks to all my kind reviewers over the year.
Special thanks to Brian Gibson for his time and patience to help me improve my English skills.
And of course, thanks to all my readers, all the best for this New Year!
Thank you for these thoughts Emilien.
I’ve just started by own blog a few weeks ago, and I find your advices really helpful, especially the one about writing for oneself instead of writing for what we think others would find useful.
I’ve set myself the goal to share one post a week, no matter what happens, and see how things go from there :).
Good luck on that Sam. For the record, I also had the goal to publish once a week when I started. But after a while, I decided that stressing myself to publish something, no matter what, was not a good motivation.
I’m more happy with the fact of writing each week, but publishing only when I feel it’s understandable.
Let me know how it goes!