Blogging: How it Started
and tips for getting started if you are thinking of one too!
(or watch on YouTube here>)
I used to have a blog, during my NYC era. It started as an accountability of sorts: I was training for a half ironman and a blog helped me keep a small group of family and friends informed of my progress and helped hold me accountable for my commitment. I would pen posts on my commute to work every morning, drop in some pictures and call it a day.
It’s fun to go back and read and it’s fascinating how beautifully it holds memories both in the day-to-day mundane and the bigger overarching major events. It’s more than just a journal, I was telling short stories of my day and pairing them with photos in a single place that is hard to replicate in other forms of social media todass.
And it would live on to cover 5 years of growth well beyond that single event.
As I begin to add more consistency to my Substack blog, I’m going to borrow from my Chasing the Timberman blog and I wanted to share my lessons here in case you are considering starting your own:
Simple = Sustainable: keep it simple so you sustain it over time. Simple means:
follow a theme that makes sense for your life right now (like training for a race)
chronicle your progress with a few paragraphs (tell the good, bad, AND UGLY if you can bear it, it helps to process your lessons along the way), and
write and post whatever you can cobble together in 20-30 minutes or less (that was the length of my commute at the time).
You will get better over time, but starting simple ensures that you just get started with something you can sustain.
Do It For Yourself First: my blog was private and I had less than 10 followers, it was just family and close friends. In today’s world of social media, followers and engagement are touted as the end all be all. But when it’s just for you there is less pressure. Identify your WHY for yourself and then you are just recommitting to your why on days when you don’t feel like sharing anything. For me (at the time) it was for accountability and to tell short stories of my life in NYC.
Habit Stack It: I truly believe that the reason I was able to maintain my blog for so long was that I habit-stacked writing the blog post with my daily commute on the subway (case in point: as soon as I had a walking commute the blog came to it’s natural end). What is something that you already do every day for 20-30 minutes that you can either add blogging to (a mindless public transportation commute, coffee & sunshine) or stack blogging with (blogging right after taking a shower or whatever thing you do every day like a walk or meditation practice).
If you were thinking of starting your own blog and need a little encouragement: DO IT! If you want to know where to begin, begin here (Substack is free and easy to use, so it is a super low barrier to entry). And if you go for it let me know so I can follow.
See you here next time, I’ll follow the lessons learned by 30-something me to keep it simple, do it for me, and habit stack it.