I was thinking back recently to my early days as a blogger. This was back when anyone who was anybody was on MySpace (remember them?), and if you were a writer, you started out on Blogger. Back then, I didn't know what I was doing, and aside from a few friends and sympathetic family members, I had no visitors to my blog.
One day, someone asked me; "If no one is reading your work, then who are you writing for? That's the kind of question that'll make you think, right? But to be honest, I didn't want anyone outside of my circle to see my work, as I was making TONS of mistakes while learning the craft of blogging.
My writing read like a cake that hasn't risen yet. I wasn't ready to "go public" yet, so there I was creating content for an audience of one. Just imagine, I had no editing software, so I had to fix mistakes as I found them, and trust me, many made it past my early attempts. But as I am wont to do, I kept consuming writing resources, while learning and making mistakes, then course-correcting.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I wasn't about to give up on something I loved doing. There was something magical about taking a blank screen, and seeing it fill up with content that came right out of your own head. Bad as it was back then, at least it was my own creation, and I WAS getting better, bit by bit.
Like Sisyphus pushing that rick uphill, even though it kept rolling back down, I'd advance a little bit further day by day.
At some point, the honest feedback I was getting, prompted me to come out of the shadows and let the world know that I was here, that my little Apple and technology review site was live and open for business.
But who was I writing for again? I think it was still mostly for me, because trust me, nobody was kicking the door down to get into my site! Lol! I learned about SEO, and optimizing for first Yahoo (remember them?) and then the almighty Google (which wasn't so "almighty" back then, but I could see the promise in them).
I did A/B split-testing. Tried different fonts and background page colors. Tested posting at different times of the day (before finding the sweet spots of times and days throughout the week). And just kept learning and growing as a blogger.
I can still remember when I "hit it" with a review of the new version of Photoshop, and my review ranked near (or was it "at") the top of page one on Google for a few days, before somebody at Adobe got a clue.
I'd always checked my traffic statistics for the two or three people a week that found my site, and almost fell out of my chair when there were suddenly hundreds showing up in one day.
All because of that one article...
Fast forward to today, and we all face some of the same challenges as content creators, as I did in those pre-crypto days, as traffic is hardly guaranteed.
I write for search, since everything we create online is indexed. I write for the people that find me through Twitter, as I have a larger audience there over my many accounts. I write for the scarce visitors I'm blessed to have on Hive, so that I can provide some value to them. But if I'm honest, I still mostly write for myself, as it gives me joy to create something out of nothing and to grow as a writer. One. Word. At. A. Time. :)
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