Make Blogging Great Again

My original title for this was going to be “Blogging is Fun Again!” However, I couldn’t resist putting a little spin on Donald Trump’s slogan.

Recently, I’ve been thinking back to when I started blogging. It’s only natural as this blog turns ten years old in a couple of months.

Blogging was a different world back then. It was mostly a curiosity. Almost every blogger I knew had some kind of technology background. While there were still a lot of blogs at the time, most of them seemed to focus on cats and/or that day’s lunch. There weren’t many people writing about taboo topics like their own personal finance.

You wrote and article and you hit publish. Some people stepped up their game and added images. That was the extent of it.

Then people started to augment their blogs with other things. Social Media started to explode and if you wanted to reach your audience, you had to be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. Bloggers decided to move beyond the written word and into audio with podcasts, video with their YouTube channels. At the last FinCon personal finance conference, the Next Big Thing was bloggers using Periscope to do live video.

While many people find these a lot of fun, I’m an introvert and this is far outside of my comfort zone. I honestly don’t want to “be everywhere” online… largely because I’m already spending so much time online learning and researching stuff. Some of this stuff feels like marketing. I’m not the biggest fan of marketing largely because I feel it often conflicts with my goal of helping people reach financial freedom. (Or maybe that’s the excuse I’m going to combine with my “Lazy” moniker.)

Recently, even writing articles has become a little less fun. There’s always and initial excitement when you start to learn something new. There’s always more to learn about personal finance, but the excitement curve has flatlined a bit. That’s fine and to be expected. (Of course it is obviously less fun when helping people brings frivilous lawsuits against me.)

All of this is a long way of saying that I started a new blog over the weekend. In the upcoming weeks, I’ll be talking more about it, but for now I’ll be quiet while I continue to set it up. Yes, I still have Be Better Now, but the articles for that website are very, very research intensive. It is difficult for me to put aside the hours it takes to feel like I’m creating a really great post for the site.

In contrast the new blog was so much fun. I was fortunate to find the perfect domain name still available. I quickly registered it and used this great deal with Bluehost to install WordPress on it.

The focus of the blog is a topic that I am extremely interested in which is always a plus. I was racing around writing blog posts and ideas for future blog posts. I finished writing about 5-6 blog posts and came up with ideas for another 13 or more. I chose a theme and customized it. I created a favicon. I picked added a few WordPress plugins.

Honestly, my fingers couldn’t move fast enough to do everything I wanted to. The look and feel isn’t polished. It looks like a half-constructed policeman’s beard.

I rushed to tell a couple of close friends who probably looked at it and shrugged their shoulders. They couldn’t read the articles that I’ve written to be published in the future or see the vision I have for it. Even if they could, I bet they’d shrug their shoulders. It really isn’t their thing.

I’m excited to see where this goes. It might go nowhere as this is absolutely the wrong time for me to start another blog. I just hope that the passion I have and the speed of which everything seems to come together makes it work.