Blogging in the “Olden Days”

WRITING | FREELANCING | BLOGGING

A reflection on how things have changed in 15 years of blogging

When I started blogging there was no social media.

I’m going to let that sink in.

It was the year before Twitter launched and Facebook went public. WordPress was only a couple years old and I didn’t know anybody who was using it.

Blogging was a simpler affair then. We were excited about this new way of sharing our writing and we blogged regularly. There were no rules about how long posts be should be or what should be included. There were no images, for the most part. It was just you, your words, and your fellow bloggers.

Getting Started in Blogging — Take 2

The year I say I started blogging — 2005 — was actually my second attempt. I’d tried Blogger in 2003, been unimpressed and deleted my account. But you can’t fight your nature, and mine is to try new things. So when a site called WritingUp launched in 2005, I was ready to give it another try, Even then, I had no idea then that blogging would become my main source of income as a freelance writer.

If you look at some of my early posts, there are some aspects of blogging that have remained the same from then to now. I started out by sharing stuff I’d found online, then started doing book reviews, then moved to writing about what I knew. At the time, that was writing. That eventually led to my writer mentoring blog, Get Paid to Write Online, which people are still visiting, even though I haven’t posted anything new in years.

When I started blogging, I had already been a professional writer for about 18 years. And so even though the platform was new, the idea of using writing to inform and educate was not. At WritingUp we were all learning together. People would ask questions about writing, and I would answer with a blog post. If you think about it, that’s what most business blogs do now, so I guess it’s no surprise that this comes naturally to me.

Polishing My Blogging Skills

In those days every comment on your post was exciting and you responded to every single one. In my first year of blogging, there wasn’t a lot of comment spam; that came later. And because there was no social media, there was no need to share your writing beyond the platform. All you had to do was write and respond, and that was enough for most of us at that time.

Looking back from the vantage point of 2020, my early blog posts were short, and totally unoptimized. They probably weren’t even my best writing. As writers, we grow with every piece of writing we create. Millions of words later, it’s fair to say that my writing is a lot more polished now.

From Hobby Blogging to a Freelance Blogging Career

But I am grateful for that early foray into blogging because it paved the way for my current writing career. A fellow blogger on WritingUp held a competition to find a writer for his new business blog. I won the competition, and got $50 and a regular writing gig for my trouble.

I started writing about blogging and online tools, which led to another gig writing about WordPress and social media. That first gig also led to the publication of my first ebook: Getting started in Blogging. Though it’s now woefully out of date, it’s still available on Amazon. (My author profile is here, if you’re interested.)

Each subsequent blogging gig was a stepping stone. Over the years, I’ve blogged about freelancing, writing, blogging, WordPress, travel, web tools and apps, language, translation, and much more. More recently, I’ve blogged mostly about digital marketing and ecommerce. (Here’s my one of my writing portfolios.)

Blogging Then and Now — What’s Changed?

Blogging today looks very different from in 2005. There’s now much more to it than writing. Blogging for business means you have to be a good researcher and to know SEO. Sometimes it means you have to find and include images, and take screenshots (I guess the tech blogs have done that since forever, but personal bloggers didn’t have to at the start.) And it means you have to use social media to amplify your content as a matter of course, otherwise nobody will ever hear about it.

Here’s another thing that’s different from 2005. Where I used to blog in one place, and formed a community with the people who also blogged there, now I blog in multiple places, and the communities I belong to are spread across multiple platforms. I can’t decide whether that’s a gain, or a loss.

Note: I wrote this article after a discussion with Ming Qian. Would love it if my early blogging friends like Mitchell Allen and Holly Jahangiri would share their perspective.

What am I writing about now? Check out the newest stage in my writing evolution in the article below:

[embed]https://medium.com/illumination/becoming-an-anti-racist-writer-78bf3dc1462e[/embed]

Sharon Hurley Hall is a professional B2B writer and blogger, and co-host of The Introvert Sisters podcast.