Blogging for Potential Employers
Having graduated college in 2013, the blog's focus shifted specifically to advertising myself as a dedicated writer searching for a career in copywriting. I cluttered the site with links to my online portfolio, résumé, and other work-related areas in an effort to make it easy for potential employers to find everything they'd want to find when considering me as a job candidate, and I blogged about non-controversial events in my life such as my wedding, what books I'd read, and how I went about writing fiction.Blogging for the Masses
I obtained a full-time copywriting position in late September (having been a paid intern elsewhere since shortly after graduation) and realized almost immediately that the blog was due for another change. Rather than focus my content on the small group of people that I know in the real world and potential employers, I thirsted for a wider audience and experimented with turning my personal writing anecdotes into topical advice posts for other writers.At the end of 2014, however, my blogging activities left a foul taste in my mouth. Everything I blogged in the last few months felt stale and useless. I realized that I needed to think long and hard about what type of content I had to offer, and in January of 2015 I wrote my first and fourth most viewed posts of all time, both of which were critiques of television commercials. While this seems like a success on the surface, I attribute the posts' record-breaking views to my aggressive social-media advertising of them rather than their actual public appeal (which I suppose is good, since I have a degree in advertising). At first I planned on writing similar posts throughout the year, but then my next epiphany hit:
Blogging With Passion
I realized that I wasn't posting on my blog because I wanted to anymore, but because I felt obligated to fill my self-imposed two-posts-per-month quota. Though I enjoyed poking fun at those two commercials in January, I didn't want to suck all the fun out of it by forcing myself to find more commercials to hate and writing about them twice a month. I instead decided to give up on my blog as a long-term high-priority project, and instead use it as it was originally intended; to talk about the things I feel passionate about, whenever that passion strikes. I started February off by blogging about a commercial that I love (so as to transition away from the negative commercial critiques) and then followed it up with a passionate defense of the Fifty Shades of Grey movie which is currently my second-most-viewed post ever (again, due to social media advertising).So that's what you can expect from this blog in the future. Forget boring posts meant to fill a quota, and forget regularity. My life is rapidly changing, and keeping a boring, regularly-updated blog is no longer a top priority - I need to focus my quota discipline on my family and my fiction. Instead, I plan on occasionally blogging only about those subjects that get trapped in the synapses of my brain, building up with pressure until they explode through my fingers onto this blog. I plan to stress quality over quantity.
I plan to enjoy blogging again.
Now that I plan to post less frequently, it's an even better time to sign up for my email list to have new post notifications sent right to your email!
-Ryan
