Would I Still Start a Blog Today?

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

I’ve been asked this question a lot over the years, and until very recently I would always answer with an enthusiastic yes. I taught blogging and mentored new bloggers for a long time, and I genuinely believed that blogging  was one of the best opportunities the internet had ever created, which certainly changed my life.

It allowed me to stay at home while my children were growing up, gave me a creative outlet when motherhood sometimes felt all-consuming and eventually turned into a small virtual assistant business that fitted around family life. It introduced me to people who became genuine friends, opened doors I never expected and gave me experiences I could never have imagined when I nervously published my very first post.

The trouble is, the internet didn’t stand still.

A substantial number of the tips that new bloggers all learned and shared with each other back in the day just don’t work anymore, and it is getting very much harder to find and build an audience

I don’t regret blogging. It’s been a lot of fun for me and my family, and now I am here, I’ve decided that I am going to doggedly continue, at least for a while longer. But the internet has changed a lot over the past 18 months or so, and even well-established blogs like mine are struggling to stay relevant and get views.  I think that starting a new blog in the current environment would be very hard indeed.

The Early Years of Blogging

I don’t think younger bloggers quite realise how exciting but also terrifying those early years felt.

The internet suddenly gave ordinary people a voice. You didn’t need a publishing company, a newspaper column or a television programme. If you had something to say, you could simply write it and somebody, somewhere, might discover it.

That felt almost magical.

I certainly never imagined that writing about motherhood, working from home and everyday family life would lead to opportunities beyond my own little corner of the internet. Yet somehow it did.

I started with a little start up blog called Healthworx, in about 2007, back when I thought I might become a personal trainer. At that point I had precisely no clue what I was doing, and like many first blogs it failed to fly. To be honest I didn’t really enjoy the heath and fitness industry, and I wasn’t writing from the heart. It makes all the difference.

Then in 2010, I met a lovely Australian lady online. Her name is Alli Price, and she wanted to sell the UK licence for her online mums networking business called Motivating Mum, because she was moving back to Australia and she was going to run the same business there.

I only met her once in person before I parted with my cash and she gave me a couple of hours of training, I remember only one sentence of it “Just write a blog post every week and then post about it on Facebook and Twitter – that’s all you have to do!” 

Well, I knew about Farmville on Facebook, and had a few friends on there, and I looked at Twitter and thought “how hard could it be?” And off I went…

I quite enjoyed Twitter at first. I discovered hashtags which led to whole sub-communities of women bloggers, and we all started to help each other. I got obsessed with it for a while, and six months after starting the business, I had 5,000 followers.

I also enjoyed the networking aspect. While my children were at school, I became a lady who lunches. I had my own lunches organised through Motivating Mum, and I also went to other events. One day I let slip that I had built 5,000 Twitter followers in six months, and another woman who was there gasped and asked me to speak at her upcoming blog conference. I said yes, why not, even though I was terrified. That decision changed my life.

My big lucky break

I spoke in front of 400 parent bloggers at the conference in 2011. I still didn’t know a huge amount about blogging, and I felt like a bit of a fraud, but I got through my little bit and everybody clapped politely. Then afterwards, a company that promoted voucher codes and saving money came and spoke to me, and asked if I would like to be a blog ambassador for them. I wasn’t paid, but they offered me the chance to go to their parent company conference in New York for three days, all expenses paid. I couldn’t believe my luck!.

And this is where things got silly.

I went to New York, and the conference was fun, although a lot of it was not relevant to the UK at the time. However, there was one light-hearted breakout session about Extreme Couponing. Apparently at that time in the US, you could cut enough coupons out of newspapers and magazines, such that a weekly family shop might only cost you $10, or sometimes the shop might even owe you money.

I thought it was completely bonkers, but I was still a very new blogger and a blog ambassador, so when I returned from the conference I felt I ought to write about everything I’d learned, including the crazy bits..

What I hadn’t realised, is that Extreme Couponing was taking off in the UK too – with a new show on Channel 4. A few weeks after I wrote the piece, I got several calls from the national press, asking if they could come to my house and interview me. I said yes, why not, hoping that I would get to promote my new-ish blog and also plug the company I had been representing. But no, it was all about me, and the story angle they chose, was that I was a mum who was so into Extreme Couponing that I had paid to go to New York for a seminar to learn about it. I told the editors that they had the story wrong before publication, but they insisted that it was that story or none. So I decided to roll with it…

Of course, the story made me sound absolutely ridiculous – fancy spending all that money to save a few pennies on groceries… 

I got absolutely ripped to shreds in the online comments. But after appearing in the Sunday Express, the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, Woman Magazine, the One Show on television, and several radio stations, I noticed that I was getting more blog viewers than I had ever had in my life.

Looking back, I sometimes think blogging in those days was a bit like the Wild West. None of us really knew what we were doing, but occasionally extraordinary things happened.

The Mum Blogger Community

I carried on going to blog conferences after that, although I didn’t speak again. I met a lot of lovely people, some of whom became firm friends of mine, and one or two became clients, when I expanded my business into helping other mums with blogging, social media and other business admin.

The blogging community was unlike anything I’d experienced. We met in person a few times a year from up and down the country, and greeted each other like long lost friends.

Bloggers read each other’s work, and left encouraging comments, because we genuinely wanted to continue the conversation, and help other mums with their struggles. I set up a group on Facebook called the Blogging Mums Club, and at its peak it had over 5,000 members.

We recommended blogs we loved. We linked to each other. When one blogger succeeded, it somehow felt as though we all celebrated together.

Of course there was competition. There always is. But it rarely felt cut-throat. You could learn from the more successful people – we always shared what was working on different social media channels so that everyone could succeed. 

Pinterest was something special that stood out for bloggers when it first started – the algorithm rewarded you for reposting content from other users on your boards, and so we all shared each others’ stuff, and all our content went viral almost every time.

It was almost too easy. 

Then the Internet grew up

None of these changes happened overnight. They crept in gradually.

Facebook became bigger and had more ads. Instagram stopped being a site to post family photos and became a place where you had to perform. Video overtook writing, and the algorithms for each channel changed every few months so it was hard to keep track of how often you should post on each channel.

At the same time, attention spans became shorter, and businesses realised that social media could sell products. Then young and beautiful influencers appeared, existing mainly to build personal brands rather than communities.

Then more recently, AI started creeping in on social media, and telling people the answers to their questions without sending them to a blog written by someone who had experienced the same problem and could offer real-world solutions.

Each individual change made sense at the time. Together, though, they created a very different internet from the one I originally fell in love with.

Somewhere along the way, blogging stopped feeling like a conversation and started feeling like one small voice competing with millions of others.

The day I realised everything had changed

I was quite a fan of AI when I first saw it arrive. It fascinated me and I enjoyed conversing with a being that appeared sentient without being alive. It was funny when it made mistakes and you could tell it wasn’t real, but that was part of the fun.

But then came the big Google AI upgrade and I watched years of my hard -won Google traffic disappear almost overnight. Like many bloggers, I’d spent years learning how search engines worked, writing helpful articles targeting relevant keywords, sharing them on social media and gradually building an audience.

Then one algorithm update changed everything, and my readership just tanked for no reason. I carried on for a while, but nothing I did was working to bring my views back. I won’t pretend that didn’t hurt, not because I was chasing vanity metrics, but because to me every page view represented a real person who had found my little part of the internet, read something I’d written and had found comfort and support there.

Watching those numbers fall felt strangely personal. I found myself asking questions I never thought I’d ask. 

• Have I just been winging it all these years, and in fact my writing is rubbish? 
• Is blogging still worth it? In this video age, does anybody even read long articles anymore?
• Am I finally too old for all this techie stuff, watching technology quietly move on without me ?

I’ll be honest, I gave up for a while. I tried a few posts in my normal style and watched as they bombed along with all my other content. I stopped posting in the Blogging Mums Club because I did not have the answers to the new bloggers who were struggling to find their place. I started to feel that maybe I should retire from this space…

I took about a year or so, just writing the odd thing. I kept posting on social media and keeping in touch with my oldest friends, but I stopped trying to promote or sell anything with my blog.

Then I started reading different kinds of writers. I discovered thoughtful essayists, many of them older than me, writing the sort of reflections that only come from living a full life. I remember thinking, perhaps I could do that too.

You can’t keep me away…

So a couple of months ago, I decided to have another go at writing, only this time, instead of caring so much about my niche topics and my metrics I decided to write for fun, mainly for me. I ignored the algorithms; preferred lengths etc. and just went off on a ramble…

I have used AI, not to make up experiences that didn’t happen, but to help me to collect my thoughts, put them in some kind of order, and bring me back down to earth when my fingers fly too fast across the keys and I make silly bloopers.

And here’s the strange thing.

These last few weeks I’ve probably enjoyed writing more than I have for years.

Perhaps because I’ve stopped worrying so much about what Google wants. Google didn’t care about me last year, so I don’t care about it.

Perhaps because I’m finally writing the stories that have been sitting in my head for a long time, and I think there is a tale to be told. And even though my views are less than a fraction of what they were a couple of years ago, I’m getting a lot more comments from real people now, and I’m finding out that many of them are having the same thoughts as me.

AI has claimed the space on the internet I used to inhabit, but this has made me realise something unexpected but important.

Facts are becoming easier to generate but experience isn’t. Nobody else has lived my life, and seen the changes that i have.

Nobody else remembers having dates in internet cafes with my new boyfriend (now my husband of 24 years) and joining parenting forums when I was pregnant, because I had no clue what was about to hit me.

Nobody else remembers my attempts to build a little business between school runs, caring for my mum and all the chaos that family life brings.

AI can help me organise those memories, but it can’t create them.

So… would I recommend starting a blog today?

If your dream is to make money, or to find fame through blogging, then probably not. I think there are easier ways of trying to achieve those goals nowadays.

If you’re hoping Google will send you thousands of visitors within a few months, then I would advise caution.  The internet doesn’t work quite like that anymore.

But if you love writing and exploring ideas, and especially if you are happy to chuck in a few pictures and videos now and again.

If you want a place on the internet that belongs to you rather than being borrowed from a social media platform…

Then yes.

I still think blogging is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.

Not because of the traffic. Not because of the income. But because it brought me out of myself .

Final Thoughts

Ironically, now that my blog receives fewer visitors than it did a few years ago, I think I’m writing the best work I’ve ever written.

The articles feel more honest.

Less driven by algorithms.

More driven by curiosity.

Perhaps that’s simply what happens after twenty years online.

You stop trying to chase every new trend and start asking bigger questions instead.

Would I start a blog today?

Yes.

Not because I think it’s the easiest way to build a business.

But because writing has given me something that no algorithm, no AI tool and no social media platform can ever take away. It helped me find my own voice and the confidence to speak out. Perhaps that’s what blogging was giving me all along. I just didn’t realise it until the traffic disappeared.

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