My 900th Post: What Should I Do Differently on This Blog?

WordPress tells me this is my 900th post on this blog. At an average of around 500 words/post, that’s 450,000 words, or about four novels. As I wrote in my last post, it takes me 16-20 hours a month to write two posts per week, and I could probably write about 25,000 on a novel in that time (which isn’t even my NaNoWriMo speed)—at least 20,000 words.

So, is blogging worth the time it takes away from writing my novels?

If you’re reading this post, I hope you say yes.

But it’s important to me to assess periodically how I spend my time. And year-end is a good time for these assessments, as I start to set goals for the year ahead.

The Advantages of Blogging:

I started this blog as a way to build my writer platform, to get my name out on the Internet. It has done that. Typing “Theresa Hupp” into a browser brings up this website. My posts get enough hits on a variety of topics that I think I have a decent author platform.

I also wanted my posts to preserve memories for my family, both of my growing-up years and of the years raising my kids. I generally post several times a month about family. Now that I’ve been at it for almost nine years, I’ve run out of the most poignant and humorous incidents. Sometimes I feel like I’m stretching for relevant family content to post that won’t embarrass a family member too much.

I also try to educate readers about the historical eras I write about. I post about once a month on the history of the Oregon Trail, the California Gold Rush, or other events in the mid-nineteenth century.

When I have new books out, I update readers in my posts. I also post about my writing process. So the blog serves as an occasional marketing vehicle.

Another positive feature of creating all these posts is that I now have a lot of content I could reuse. I could publish anthologies of posts on various topics, like my Family Recipe anthology. Or I could post non-fiction books about the historical and geographical topics I write about. I haven’t done so yet, but that is a goal of mine. A high-school teacher once told me to reuse any stories or essays I could. And a work colleague always said we should “shamelessly steal” whatever we could from other HR professionals, rather than recreating the wheel—and I agreed with him. It’s my content, and I should use it as many ways as I can.

The Downsides of Blogging:

As I mentioned above, blogging takes a lot of time away from writing my novels. This was brought home to me during NaNoWriMo last month. I was able to spend almost all of my writing hours working on my novel draft, rather than writing two posts each week, finding pictures for them, then uploading the posts.

Not only does blogging take time, but it is a distraction. Each time I shift gears from novel to blog, I have to reorient myself to the topic I’m writing about. I try to write blog posts in batches, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Also, maintaining this website takes work. I need an author website, but it could be a simpler site without the blog. I switched to a self-hosted site in early 2017, and I haven’t given it a major overhaul since then. WordPress has moved to Gutenberg during these four years, and my WordPress theme uses a different page builder than Gutenberg. Changing all this on the website would take time and effort. This is a 2020 goal that did not get accomplished.

So, I am not fully utilizing the potential of my blog (or website). But doing more would take more time. I’m committed to continuing the blog until my 1000th post, which will be about another year or so. Beyond that, I don’t know . . .

Tell me—what changes would you like to see in the blog, either with respect to content or formatting?