Whiona writes:
Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To “convert” our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we have to say simply isn’t enough? Personally, I want nothing to do with it. I’m sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet.
A hobby that happens to pay is different from turning your hobby into a business. One difference is you would do your hobby anyway, even if it didn’t happen to pay. That also means, by extension, that you’ll need to sustain your financial health by doing something else.
The most important thing for me—at this blog—is to feed the playful aspect of my writing. Anything that happens to come out of it is nice, and I’m not relying on it directly to make money.
One final note: I work professionally in marketing, effectively using the skills that I’ve earned from blogging to help businesses grow. I’m currently working at Figma to do that. It’s important to very sparingly apply the skills I learn at work to my blogging practice; I know that this headline isn’t optimized, I know that this piece is very roughly written and needs a lot of polish, and I know that I didn’t write this with an audience in mind.
Purposely leaving those optimization practices out feels like a very counterintuitive thing—why wouldn’t you want this to go viral?!—and I think the omission is a critical part of the practice. The goal is to learn how to turn the volume of that part of my brain down.
Blogging is often one of the most energizing parts of my life, and I plan to keep it that way.