Not A Professional Blogger

Sometimes….

1. Sometimes I’m a little extremely wordy. I say a lot. I write blog posts and think… “who is ever going to read all of that?” and then I post them anyway.
2. Sometimes I get off topic. I’ll start talking about the weather and then out of nowhere it’s “Oh look! A Chicken!” (I thank my mom for my attention span).
3. Sometimes I’m not very timely. I’ll post about something from two years ago because I’m only just getting around to it.
4. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, or am ‘greedy’. I want to post recipes, crafts, pictures, news, quotes, workouts… I want it all. And I want it now. (sure hope that one doesn’t rub off on my daughter!)
5. Sometimes I’m unorganized. See all those categories over there that are supposed to help you navigate all these posts? Yeah… good luck with that!

It’s not that I don’t try, or that I don’t want to be better though…. I was blog hopping around and saw a post on Never Say Never Blog that really resonated with me and the way I’ve been thinking about this blog…

I have been blogging for over a decade, off and on (now I feel old…) Before when I blogged it was to vent. It was more of a ‘diary’ than anything. I’d blog about my day, and my lunch (and I’m not talking recipes), I’d blog about how bored I was (seriously, how bored do you have to be to read a blog about how bored someone else is?!).

Needless to say, when I was pregnant I really wanted to start back up with a family blog so I could actually blog about something. I wanted to chronicle Averie as she was growing, giving me a place to record memories besides just pictures and scrapbooks, and a place to share those things with family and friends, not just a baby book or a diary that sat on the shelf collecting dust.

Problem was, I wanted to talk about the other stuff I enjoy too, not just ‘Raising Averie’. I wanted to talk about recipes and exercise and budgeting and the stupid thing the guy on the plane said to me last week… I had no real topic, no direction, no fancy name or idea for one and it was driving me crazy. I just couldn’t get started until I ironed it ALL out. And I let it bug me for years.

Seriously.

Over THREE years.

At one point I missed blogging enough that I thought I’d try to go ahead and be a coupon blogger. Although I love couponing, I don’t love blogging about it constantly as much as I love teaching other people how to do it and actually saving money. Blogging about it took away my time to actually ‘do’ it. It wasn’t a good fit for me, but teaching the classes and keeping the training material updated is right up my alley, so I’ve been keeping up with that, and Couponing in Iowa will stay alive for that purpose for quite some time…

In the end, I was still blogless.

I thought about going back to my old private online LiveJournal account, where only a select group of friends could see it. But I’d really outgrown that college identity. Nothing in my life is so secretive that I can’t blog about it publicly, and if it is that secretive, I probably shouldn’t be blogging about it in the first place.

So I decided I’d host my own. I started following numerous other blogs, paying attention to how they categorized, what they talked about, what their layouts were like, how they were named…. To the point that I was overwhelmed and thought I’d never be good enough to actually blog again. I was so frustrated in that moment that I remember I actually said it out loud.

“I’m never going to be good enough to actually blog again!”

Thankfully I was home alone because I actually laughed out loud at myself. It was dramatic – like I regressed to my teenage years and thought my life was over.  I was making excuses, and those excuses that were keeping me away from something I loved to do. You don’t really have to be ‘good’ at any of that stuff to blog.

So I bit the bullet and decided I was going to blog about whatever I wanted and it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a specific topic, or a direction. I didn’t need a fancy blog name, or a perfect layout. Heck I didn’t even need a domain name. I didn’t need to be totally organized right out of the gate, I didn’t need to know all the categories of things I might post and how to arrange them in a hierarchy. The pieces should fall together over time. It’s not a business, it’s not my full-time job and it’s not like I get paid to do it!

This is supposed to be fun.

Worrying about how everyone else had their blogs named, organized, themed, set up and voiced was sucking all the fun out of it. So I said ‘screw it’ and started posting whatever I wanted. Then I said ‘screw it’ and shared it with all of my friends and family before it was ‘perfect’…

Will I still look at other people’s blogs and think “ooooh, shiny” and lust over it?

Absolutely. (Hello?! Have you met me?! Queen of spreadsheets and new gadgets?!)

You can bet that I’m taking notes, but that doesn’t mean I need to stop all of my posting and fix it all right now.

This is my blog, it’s not ‘everyone else’s blog’, and ‘everyone else’s blog’ didn’t start out perfect either. It’s time to just get back to basics, and have fun.

That said, hopefully those of you that are still around are forgiving of my wordy, off-topic, untimely, all-over the place and unorganized blog because I don’t predict any of that will change in the near future…  

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