Can blogging change your life?
Chances are you or someone you know runs
a blog (even if that blog hasn’t seen a new post for the last three months).
After all, there are more than 150,000,000
blogs on the internet today. That’s a lot of content being generated (Wordpress
sites alone account for 6 new posts every second) so it’s hard to imagine a
new blogger diving into such a vast pool and making even the smallest splash.
But if you’re considering starting a blog, whatever it may be about, I want to
tell you one thing:
BLOGGING
CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Let’s be clear about this, blogging is a
hobby for most people. Some are lucky enough to make a little bit of money from
it, a very few people are even making a living from it. But if you want to get
rich, you’re better off looking elsewhere. Blogging has to be about sharing
your love for a particular topic with the world, not about trying to earn a few
pennies from advertising, or selling people products. Leave that to the big
companies and business bloggers. At its heart, blogging is about connecting
like-minded people and allowing them to share their interests and knowledge
with one another.
So, how can blogging change your life?
There are a huge variety of blogs
splattered across the internet, covering a huge range of topics, from beauty
products to relationship advice, books to opera, comics to video games. Each
and every one has its own character and a blogger behind the scenes who has
poured hours into making the site as engaging as possible. Each of them has
different goals, but I want to share with you exactly how blogging has changed
my life.
I first started my book blog www.bibliofreak.net back in May of 2011.
As I fired up www.blogger.com and
registered my own URL, I was filled with dreams of becoming the definitive
voice in book blogging, building a following of thousands within weeks, and
being paid major dollar to endorse anything and everything. That dream lasted
approximately two minutes and fifty seconds (roughly the time it took for me to
discover the hundreds of fantastic book blogs out there, filled with smart,
informative posts, and beautifully designed layouts – comparing these to my
empty shell of a site I knew I was out of my depth).
Of course, being a chipper sort, I
didn’t let this deflate me for too long and I was soon banging out opinionated
book reviews at a rapid pace. Sadly, these literary nuggets passed largely
unobserved by the billions of web users who, apparently, weren’t waiting on
tenterhooks for a pretentious young writer-sort to come along and pronounce
judgement on all manner of books from Camus’s
The Stranger to the slightly less
high-brow Football Manager Stole My Life. In
the face of such seeming indifference, I had to re-evaluate exactly what I
wanted from blogging. So, with a brand new theme installed on my website, I
pressed on afresh with two very simple goals in mind:
1. As an aspiring author, I hoped
that blogging would get me into the routine of writing regularly and help me
learn the craft of both reading critically and writing for an audience.
2. I hoped to meet other young
writers and avid readers whose company I could share across the web that
connects us all.
After this, things picked up and I began
to discover all the great benefits of blogging.
Getting social
With my ambitions pared down from world
domination to slightly humbler goals, I found very quickly that people were
interacting with my blog and that I was meeting a raft of new people not only
on www.bibliofreak.net but across
social media. I’m pleased to say that I consider many of those people friends
today, and I’ve enjoyed an enormous number of enriching conversations with
readers from around the world that I simply would have missed out on if I
hadn’t started my little blog.
Freebies
An unexpected side effect of building my
blog into one of the most popular in the UK, was that I slowly become inundated
with requests from authors and publishers hoping that I’d review their books in
exchange for a free copy. Besides being a massive and unneeded boost to my ego
– aha, people do care what I think, clearly I am the voice of my literary
generation after all! – this was hugely exciting for me: as a bibliophile, the
idea of getting free books, often before they were published was an unexpected and
wonderful boon. In fact, I had to stop myself accepting every request I
received for fear of drowning in the already overflowing collection of books
that lay scattered around my bedroom.
Experiences
Another pleasant surprise of becoming
known in a few blogging circles was that publishers started to invite me to
book launches and other literary events in the real world (you know, that place
where things don’t happen on a computer screen). The first time I accepted one
of these invitations and attended an event, I couldn’t quite believe that my
ramblings in a tiny corner of the internet had led me to be holding a flute of
champagne while I made (awkward) small-talk with assorted big wigs of the
publishing industry – until that point, I’d seen no real connection between
cyberspace and meatspace (as some bloggers rather charmingly call the real
world). The fact is, blogging is all about connections, and those
person-to-person connections can lead you into all sorts of exciting
experiences. The biggest invite I’ve had was to the first ever Folio Prize award ceremony, which took
place in a swanky London hotel – to be rubbing shoulders with award-winning
authors and members of the media seemed bizarre to me. But did I mention,
blogging can change your life?
The big one
When I set out on my blogging journey,
there was one goal I had which I didn’t really share with anybody. It was the
end-game of all the reading and writing I was doing for the blog, and an ambition
I’d held for some time. The fact was, like so many people, I wanted to be a
published author. It’s quite a leap from self-publishing blog posts about any
topic you fancy writing about, to putting together a novel that actually
appeals to readers en masse. It’d be wrong to say blogging was the sole reason
I managed to achieve my goal of having a book published, but it was the thing
that gave me the confidence, discipline, and connections to get it done. I’m
pleased to say that my debut novel ****, or, The Anatomy of Melancholy
is out now and has had favourable reviews in such world-class publications as The Lancet (truly the furthest from my
little blog I can imagine getting)! Perhaps a little ironically given my
blogging background, the book looks at the dangers of the internet and how
isolating it can be.
Advice for new bloggers
The beauty of blogging is that you can
write about whatever interests you. For me, that was books, but there is an
audience for just about any hobby you enjoy, be it premium make-up brands or something
more niche, say, taxidermy of small reptiles (that’s fairly niche, right?). I
hope hearing a little about how blogging has changed my life, helping me
achieve some of my goals and providing an entrance to the literary world I’d
yearned to join for some time, has been helpful if you’re just setting out on
your journey. You don’t have to have grand goals for your blog: making a few
new friends and sharing your opinions is, in honesty, the simplest and most
pleasurable part of blogging. But if you want something more than that, there’s
very few places that blogging can’t take you. If you do it right.
