I might have been pregnant when I started my first blog. Ifso, the year was 2006. If not, I started a year or two later. I can’t rememberhow many posts I ultimately published to that first blog, but what I doremember is that it was fulfilling and fun. I wrote brief personal storiesabout my life with the goal of encouraging fellow believers to strengthen theirfaith. I connected every post to a spiritual lesson.

Then, I got greedy.

I heard that you could make money with a website, just bywriting a few 600-word articles a week. Knowing that my husband no longer likedhis job, I decided I was going to be his hero and begin to write content thatwould bring visitors to my blog who would click on an ad or an affiliate link.

I was going to replace my husband’s income, and then some.

Suffice to say that I’ve had a love-hate relationship withblogging ever since. Mostly hate, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Ionly ever earned a few hundred dollars (that's lifetime, not monthly or even annually) via blogging. It’s that nobody readsblogs to connect with others or share in their personal life. They go toYouTube and Instagram for that. Nowadays, if you want to get traffic to a blog,you have to pretend you’re an expert about a certain highly-searched topic andwrite the equivalent of a thesis paper at least once a week. Two thousand wordsor bust.

And every single blogpost for the life of the blog must be about the same topic.

The state of blogging today:

No fun.

No fulfillment.

No writing from your heart.

Nope.

You have to follow a bunch of rules. You have to worry everysecond about keywords, metadata, links, and content over-delivery. You have tostick to one topic. If you don’t, the search engines won’t consider you anauthority on anything you write about and will pass you by.

Blogging is now a job. A job, I might add, that doesn’tguarantee a stable or steady income… if it provides any income at all.

They say that if you start an online business via a blog,you’re in charge of your own destiny.

No.

You’re.

Not.

Google is.

As a matter of fact, Google is the reason for the death ofthe truly personal blog, an online space where people used to share theirlives, and a lot of other like-minded people would come to read it and sharetheir own perspectives in the comment section.

If there are any such blogs today that get a lot of monthlyvisitors, it’s either because they began fifteen-plus years ago and thebloggers grew a huge audience before Google changed the rules, or because theyare run by celebrities.

My fall into the blogging matrix… and my climb back out.

Earlier this year, I decided that I was going to market mybooks in large part by turning this blog into an authority Christian website.If you read the last four or five posts, you can see that I jumped through allthe hoops: most are at least two thousand words long, loaded with relevantkeywords, and give step-by-step information. I’d planned to include a weeklyBible study, and write articles that answered the top questions and issues thatChristians ask and face.

Whether I really cared about the questions and issues ornot. Whether I had personal experience with them, or not.

I was bored and feeling trapped after writing the secondarticle.

I stuck to it for longer. If I could just get in the habitof churning out those tedious, impersonal articles, it wouldn’t be so bad aftera while, right?

Wrong.

These days, if something doesn’t give me joy or fulfillment,I drop it like a hot potato.

So I stopped and backed away. Gave my blog and myself somespace.

And came to realize something.

The mere act ofwriting gives me joy, as long as I’m writing from the heart. I don’tneed anyone else to read it.

So.

I’m reverting back to the “good ol’ days” of blogging. I’mgoing to share personal stories and insights in order to encourage believers ontheir spiritual journey. And, whenever I feel like it, I’m also going to writeabout other topics about which I have an undying interest.

This is not going to be an authoritative blog.

It’s going to be a personal blog. Because I’m going to getpersonal. I’m going to share my mountains and valleys, my struggles andtriumphs. I’m also going to share things that I’ve learned that I believe areimportant for others to know.

Whether they relate to Christian encouragement or not.

But I’m not going to worry about SEO or Google. I’m notgoing to care about views. I’m not going to try to be an “authority.”

Authorities often get it wrong.

I’m going to write to encourage and inspire, and pray thatGod sends the people here who need to consume my content.

And now I’m going to publish this post, knowing that I mightbe the only person who ever reads it.

If you do read it, please take a minute to share yourthoughts about the death (or revival!) of personal blogging in the comments.Let me know someone is out there who agrees with me. 😉

(For more inspiring content like this, you can follow this blog if you have a Google account, bookmark this blog, follow my blog on Goodreads, and/or check out the books in the sidebar.)