Blogging - why do I do it?

I originally published this blog post in February of 2016, six years ago! I have been blogging since 2013. Not continuously. I wrote almost nothing from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2021. I won't go into the significance of those four years except to say that I was so stressed that I couldn't write despite the fact that this particular post lauds the therapeutic effects of blogging. 

Definition of a blog—absolutely agree.

I love this definition from The Urban Dictionary

Just as I didn't write my book with the intention of publishing, in fact I didn't originally intend it to be a book, I wrote is as a form of therapy, I write my blog entirely for my own benefit. If you stumble across it and find some of it interesting, then great, but I really don't much care if you don't. It amuses me, but more than that, on those occasions with I get frustrated or irritated by situations and people (mostly people), instead of lashing out, or worse, stewing quietly and getting stressed, I write about it.

When I left Ireland I also left my wonderful therapist behind. I had been seeing him twice a week for well over a year and the positive influence that he, and the therapy, had on my life is almost impossible to describe (it is chronicled in my book). But I wasn't finished with therapy. The traumas from my childhood and my first marriage were almost all spread out before me, and mostly dealt with, just not completely. So I started writing it all down. I very quickly noticed the benefits and continued to do so. Eventually I gave into pressure from family and friends who had read it, and published the book—more to get them off my back than for any other reason (I wrote about that here). But once it was published, it was finished so I turned to blogging because now writing was a habit.

As with my book, I never expected to make money or become famous and that is just as well because neither have happened. My book continues to sell a few copies every month and usually I don't even think about it. Sometimes my blog gets an unusually high number of hits, but mostly it just chugs along with sufficient number of regular readers so as not to be embarrassing. Not that I really care, seriously!

Interesting data from Jeff Bullas' web site

Of course, some people do make a lot of money—The Huffington Post is a good example. And here is an interesting article on eZaroorat, '10 Interesting Facts About Blogging' that supports Jeff Bullas' information.

Here is an article that list the negatives of blogging. None of which particularly bother me. On the opposite side of the argument this article lists 20 of the biggest blogging benefits, but only list one of the reasons I blog, which is as a writing exercise, the others are:

• To relieve frustration and irritation
• To share information that I find interesting and maybe someone else will too 
• It amuses me, 
• To store information I, or my children, may need in the future, mainly my recipes which I have now moved to a separate blog here.

An added benefit is that I am constantly learning, because when I start writing I have to research the details, and while I am harvesting this information from the Internet, with no guarantee it is all correct, I find all sorts of articles which fascinate and enlighten me, not just on the subject currently under scrutiny, but many other subjects along the way, often giving me even more ideas to write about.

When I started blogging I knew that blogs are supposed to have a specific theme, but I have never been one to march to someone else's drum, I have my own which may be somewhat out of step with the rest of the world, but I like the beat. I started with a selection of miscellaneous essays I had already written, they were totally irrelevant to my book - you might argue that everything in my book was irrelevant, and you are entitled to your opinion - but these were less so and excluded from it for that reason. After that I meandered a bit, eventually I moved the recipes and restaurant reviews to AllAboutThePlate. I also published a selection of my recipes specifically for my children. As mentioned previously but I continue to write to suit myself.

Now an idea pops into my head and I start a blog entry with just a few URLs found googling the subject. That sits waiting until I have time or sufficient interest to expand on it—or, as is currently the case with one article, waiting for some final piece of information before I can finish it. However, I don't put pressure on myself to write unless I want to and I continue to get great satisfaction from my hobby and I still do not expect to ever make money from my blogs,

Finally, The Authority Hacker has a fascinating article on those bloggers who do make a lot of money blogging.

 Source: Authority Hacker