She is helping me to design my blog layout and I’ve been asking her a few questions about blogging. She’s also has been mentioning things here and there that she thinks could be useful for me if I want to be serious about blogging and keeping at it. She asked me a question yesterday which I think is very important for me to understand. “What are the barriers that stop you from blogging?” So rather than just tell her, I thought I’d share the answer with you as well.

I have started so many blogs over the years where I’ve been so enthusiastic at the beginning. After a while, the enthusiasm wanes and they don’t get updated as much until one day they just disappear into the ether, never to be seen again. So why do I get stuck?

My Blogging Principle by Geek and Poke

I have been thinking about it and I think a lot of it comes down to my expectations of what blogging will do for me. What I have always done in the past is sit down and think about the things I could write that would interest “my readers”. “My readers” were probably a handful of friends, but I imagined that a cross section of Australia (and indeed the WORLD) were reading and I needed to find content that they would find interesting. I think this places a lot of pressure on me to go and find things that are interesting enough to blog about.

Another barrier has been my impatience. When I didn’t see a lot of discussion occurring on my blogs, I presumed that no one was reading. I figured that the content was crap, and so why should I continue to blog? It also becomes an issue of finding the time to blog, because when you make it about doing stuff for others, you generally find stuff you want to do for yourself.

What I’ve come to realise, and only in the last 24 hours, is that I have to blog for myself. I should write about things that interest me and share my thoughts and opinions on things that either effect me or are important to me. Perhaps I’ll share with you stuff that I thought was cool or funny, but it’s not because I went and sought it out. It’s because I thought, “I should share that. That’s awesome” or whatever it is I was thinking at the time.

Blogging is cathartic. It allows me to take my thoughts, form them into nice words, sentences and paragraphs, and put them in a single place. Other people can then take my thoughts and use them as they wish. They might read them and compare them to their own, helping to shape their world view. They may see some flaw in my opinion and point out something I hadn’t even considered. They may just leave a comment and confirm that I’m on the right track.

When you sum it up like that, blogging isn’t an effort at all. It allows me to tell you what I think about something, or show you something I’ve found. Blogging allows for an exchange of information between people who might never have met otherwise. A blog is a way of putting all the things that you think are important into a space that is mine, and then allowing others to see what is inside.

Blogging allows me to be true to who I am say what I really want to say and often today there is pressure, both from within and from outside forces, to be something I’m not and to keep quiet. I would be interested in what you think. Am I on the right track?