Monday 6 July 2020

Is the blogging party over?

From my first blog post
My fellow blogger Susan Jones has here posed the question: has blogging gone out of fashion? I've been wondering the same thing. I've been at it since 2011, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and while my words have never set the world on fire I know from the stats that people have been reading them and occasionally been moved to comment.


 I blog for three reasons:
  1. To make myself write;
  2. To share news and information I think might be of interest; and perhaps cynically
  3. As a marketing exercise, to keep my writing projects 'out there'.
However, response is down. Is this because I'm not giving the public what they want, as it were? Is blogging past its use-by date? Or is everyone simply too tired and/or overwhelmed to join in?

Of course, you can never tell what people are going to latch on to, whether it's on a blog, Facebook, Twitter or any of the other myriad social media platforms. I've realised that a good picture is helpful; one of my most popular Facebook posts was of a parsnip that looked like an Ood from Doctor Who. People are strange.

Has the time come to call it a day? Is there a better way to achieve my three objectives?

4 comments:

  1. I think there are tons of bloggers out there, so blogging isn't dead, but readership may be down. Nonetheless, blogging is a good way to control your own content. I say that as a non-Twitter user and a non-Facebook user, but I've heard it said somewhere.

    Seems also, as a writer, that blogging makes more sense than snippets of words in a Tweet or, um, back-n-forth things on FB (or whatever it is exactly that people do on FB).

    But maybe you're simply bored of blogging and itchin' to do something else. YouTube? Reddit? Is it time to explore other options?

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Priscilla. You've been one of my most consistent comment-leavers.

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  2. I feel the same way about my blog too, Julia. It attracts far fewer comments than when I first started out. I am loathe to just abandon it but not sure in which way to take it forward.
    I don't think the downward trend in readers is anything personal but the world changes ...

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