This blog post is going to be all about discussing insecurity as a writer. I am spending the time focusing on producing blog posts because they seem to align with where I am currently as a writer — but they also feeling less marketable, and so, less relevant, But then again, in writing a blog, you are writing for a different audience compared to the types of people that you would be writing for if you are writing a novel, for example.
From the title, you might assume that this blog post is about insecurity around writing blog posts. As with any type of writing, there are always going to be moments of doubt and insecurity, but this post is more focused on advocating for blog posts; the importance of the medium and how it fits, or can fit, within the rest of the writing world.
There are so many different types of voices, and each will approach writing very differently. Even if they are taught and understand different techniques in the same way — because we are all different. We will take the same thing, and do something completely different with it.
The idea for this blog post came about because I am focusing on writing more blog posts, and it has been really nice to realise how much I actually enjoy the medium. There is so much scope with it in terms of it being available for long-form and short-form content. There are enough so-called rules that there is enough structure, but not too many that it eventually becomes confusing and overwhelming (apart from the pressure that I put on myself!), so there is an element of freedom that is sometimes lost in novel writing. I get the feeling that blogs are somehow less important, compared to other types of writing, because people view it as ‘not reading’ because it is online and relatively short. And yet, newspapers, magazines and the like are becoming more digitalised. I feel like a blog is an extension or branch of that.
Has blogging gone out of fashion?
I ask this because I don’t think that it has. I get the impression that blogging has come and gone out of fashion over a long period of many years — and yet a blog post is something, in my experience, you are more likely to come across as part of researching something completely separate. But we are also rediscovering them as quick reads; nuggets of insight and information. For example, someone is most likely to come across my blog posts if they are a writer themselves, researching voice-to-text dictation, or productivity tips and the writing experience. If somebody were to search something along those lines, my blog post is likely to come up — and from there it is a reader's decision as to whether they find the information worth reading. I think you can begin to see how blogs unjustly seem to almost get a bad name, when comparing against different types of writing.
There is something freeing in that they are not long form necessarily — in the same way that a novel is — and yet as we are moving towards a much more digital world, blogs are becoming even more relevant, as it is sharing of information and experiences in a digital medium.
I also get the impression that people don't like to read blogs because they are written by ‘random people’, who may or may not know what they're talking about. But the general idea of reading a blog is that you get to know the person and their writing style. You get to read the information, and what they're saying, but you don't have to agree. You can take and leave whatever suits you
Blogs versus newsletters
Blogs are very much like newsletters. Newsletters seem to have come into fashion — and then rapidly gone out of fashion — in the sense that subscribers can get the latest posts in their email inbox, and it will be a periodic update of some kind. However, what I really like about blogging in comparison to newsletters is the fact that it's available automatically on the internet. So, as I was saying before, if somebody's researching a particular topic and it is relevant to a blog post, then the blog post would in theory be pushed towards their search results. So they're more likely to read it, because it's relevant to what they're thinking about and researching in the moment (such as different note-taking processes).
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