I'm just a couple of days away from wrapping up nine years of blogging. Nine years! That's just about the longest I've ever stayed with a hobby/low-paying job. Well, actually I'd done pretty well for myself turning my blog into a platform that led to other opportunities and consulting and writing jobs. I've made well over six figures from blogging, I just never hit that mark in any single year.
When I started blogging, it was about writing and story. I was thrilled to realize that with just a few clicks, I could join the ranks of some of my favorite online writers! I hoped a blog would help me launch a freelance writing career.
Truth be told, whenever my sitemeter indicated that someone from New York City visited my blog, I was certain it was a big-time literary agent checking me out.
Really.
But let's be honest, in those early days, I was thrilled when my sitemeter indicated that anyone was visiting my blog. What? 10 hits in a single day? It's only a matter of time until I get a book contract, right?
Ha!
Not only was blogging back then about the words, but there were no social media distractions (enhancements?). No Twitter. Facebook was only for college students. The guy who started Instagram probably didn't even have his driver's license yet. It was the digital dark ages.
Sometimes, I'm pretty sure that blogging for so long does more harm than good in the current environment of gorgeous photographs and highly monetized blogs. I often feel like the old lady yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off of my lawn. "You call yourself a blog with sponsored post after sponsored post and a sidebar full of ads? In my day we told stories!"
Although, to be honest, I don't tell as many stories. My kids are older and though the internet was always open and public, it feels even more so now than it did in 2005.
Lest I get too introspective and nostalgic, let me share my first real blog post. I wrote it when my boys were 4 and 6.
Remember those 10 visits per day I mentioned? Most of them landed here after Googling "fake hickey." That should have been the first clue that they weren't literary agents.
Honey, I've started a blog!
DH rolled his eyes at my enthusiastic announcement. I could see the wheels turning in his mind: How does she have time for a blog, when she doesn't have time to clean the kitchen?Ah yes, the clutter in the kitchen, the mounds of papers on the mail table, the notes, papers and clippings (mostly all mine) that seem to cover every horizontal surface in the house. Who am I to fight entropy, the tendency of all things in the universe toward a state of disorder?
Anyway, my boys were intrigued. What's a blog?
DH tells them it's a web-log, like an online journal.
Why would someone have a diary online?
An excellent question really. Why indeed?
I think of John Mellencamp's song, "Check it Out" from his Cherry Bomb album. "A million young poets, screaming out their words, to a world of people, just livin' to be heard...." This song, BTW, will be on my CD compilation Music for a Mid-life Crisis, should I ever get around to making one.
I see this blog more as a place for making and building connections than baring my soul to the world or filling up cyberspace with the mundane aspects of my life. (BTW, honey if you are reading this 6:30 concert at school tonight!)
The main topics I'll be addressing in my blog are: parenting, education/gifted children, stay-at-home moms returning to the world of paid work, chronic illness and some vague category I'll call "chick stuff." I hope to inform/enlighten or amuse others with the help of some great guest bloggers. So visit often!
Leave a comment so I know you've been here. My Husband left one comment and I left myself the other "just to try it out" or maybe to make myself feel legit. Leaving a visitor comment on my own blog reminded me of a story of a girl from my high school who supposedly rigged up her vacuum cleaner with an attachment and held it to her neck to give herself a fake hickey so that she could convince people that her made-up boyfriend was actually real. Do you think this is true? Can a person give herself a hickey with a vacuum cleaner--is this even possible? Or did a story like this circulate at every high school?
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