Keep calm people. I don’t mean it literally. This is just a hypothetical situation. Today, I want you to think about a big ‘what if’. What if you lost your blog today?
Just recently, my journal log of how I earned my first $1000 was published here at FamousBloggers. You can read the rest of the story there if you’re interested in it. One thing you’ll learn though is that before I ever reached that mark, I lost my blog and in turn, became blogless for a couple of months.
That’s my story and my reality. There are two things I’d like to point out here:
- What if it really happened to you?
- Even if it didn’t, what are the valuable (and profitable!) lessons that you can get from a blogless phase in your life?
Let’s get on to it:
What if it really happened to you?
It did happen to me so for this reason, I’m going to share with you my general experience on what it felt like. First off, it didn’t feel like the end of the world. Seriously.
Most of you have probably had blogs for about a year (or more!) and the life of blogging has been integrated already into your life. I’ve met some guys online whose life practically revolved around it.
I built my first blog back in 2008 (I was still sixteen I think back then). Oddly enough, I’ve stuck with it and pursued it as a challenge despite my young age (hey, a lot of young bloggers were on the rise back then!). So fast forward to around 2-3 years later, I upgraded it to become a pretty note-worthy blogging tips blog boasting of a PR3 plus a horde of readers. Yeah it wasn’t that great, but it didn’t suck either.
Around early 2011, I decided to let it go and move on. Now, I don’t want to keep saying the reason why (and for the sake of this post, it doesn’t really matter). The point is after years of hard-work and persistence, and of making it a part of my routine, I just dropped the whole thing and moved on.
So I woke up one day and I didn’t have a blog anymore
It’s odd at first. Like, really odd. Because I would go online and I still see my social circles, but there wasn’t any point to it anymore. I was a blogless blogger… or yeah, not really a blogger anymore but just a social entity online. It went on for 2-3 months.
Slowly, I began to untangle myself from the whole blogging routine and for a while, I felt so grounded. Like a really normal person that doesn’t have to worry if my traffic had gone down or that I haven’t written any posts in a week- or months.
It feels grounding. There’s really no other explanation for it. You have to find yourself as a person again and not this active/popular blogger trying to get more web attention. It’s just you. And this time, you’re really forced to reflect and figure out the things that matters most.
From “blogless” to “getting back on your feet”!
Obviously, I wouldn’t be sharing this to you if I didn’t get anything valuable from my blogless experience. On the contrary, I gained a lot of lessons. So listen up.
Going back to the start means you’re free to go in any direction.
When I was blogging, my mindset kept telling me that I should continually work forward, always make my blog better, always write good content, always engage with subscribers, blah blah blah. You try to keep pushing for it. At some point, you lose the sense of moving forward.
Being blogless is like being given a second chance. You have to really think this time. If you have to do it again, how would you do it? And if you don’t want to blog again, what is it that you really, really, want to do?
I figured that I still love blogging. But I don’t have the drive to be successful as a blogger. There has to be something else. So after much thought, and while I was killing time, I began to devote my time to what I really love doing ever since- designing.
Long story short, I realized that blogging and designing are two of the things that really worked best for me. So that’s what I did. Having an experience as a blogger, and being better at designing gave me a one-two-knockout combination.
I put up an online design business for the blogosphere. And the rest is history.
Take it from me
You don’t need to lose your blog to be able to think about the direction that you want to go in. Actually, that was my mistake- that it took me to lose my blog to be able to see what I should do. It doesn’t have to be the case for you.
Take some time. Think of the blog that you have now. And then think ‘what if’ you lose it? What do you do next? The answer to that should be something that you take seriously. That’s called your gut instinct. Follow it because it always has the right answers.
That’s it then. Let me know what you have in mind!
Image © iQoncept – Fotolia.com