What is Your Blogs Mission?

It’s okay, 10 years of doing this and I still don’t know either

In my early days of WordPress if you wanted to promote your blog, you went to the Community Pool.

For newer bloggers to the platform the best way to describe the Pool was a bear pit with everyone battling to get across their latest offering.

The self-promotion was pretty wild, and you’d come across blogs of all shapes and sizes. But with so much noise it was impossible to stand out, making posting a pointless exercise, but I didn’t know any better.

Although it was mostly fruitless, somehow I did make one high value connection in Benjamin.

Like myself his blog fell into a similar category of mine self-improvement, with a focus on building personal confidence.

In those early days he became one of my earliest supporters, a fan of the blog, who constantly engaged with everything I was putting out, giving me my first serious validation that I was being read, understood, and making some sort of difference to the life of another.

We would have back and forth conversation on blog, through the socials, and emails, and although we’d never spoke on the phone or seen him in person, his words came across with positive, big extroverted energy, having such power in his prose that it felt like he could be in the room with you.

He would ask the challenging questions, making me think and grow, and one day as we discussed the challenges of growing a blog audience, getting big and finding success in our creative works, he asked me

“What’s your blog’s mission? What are you trying to get people to achieve?

I know this comment was said in good faith, but it floored me as I realised I was approaching blogging with no strategic focus, preferring to write what was on my mind.

This resulted in my first extended posting hiatus as I tried to figure it out.

By overthinking the higher purpose my blog was supposed to have, I began to suffer from analysis paralysis, being critical that everything I tried (or thought about) writing had no set structure to it, or what content creators today describe as “having a niche.”

Eventually greater logic pursued, and although I still hadn’t found the big answer to what the point of me sitting down to write Perfect Manifesto was, I figured I would just keep posting until I figured it out.

Thankfully, ten years later I’m still here, and although I’ve grown with the blog being a constant feature in my life, I never really established what the point of all this is supposed to be about, but that’s okay.

Not everything needs to be a mission

In reflection, the upside of having a mission is it’s give you a greater focus so whoever reads your work knows what you’re about, and can establish whether they want to keep following along.

The downside is that most missions have an end, so if this is your approach to blogging, then it’s worth thinking about what you do when you reach that natural conclusion.

Do you stop? Start another mission blog? Keep hashing it out even though it’s served its purpose?

Personally I could never see the point of putting in all that effort into a blog with the intention of deliberately abandoning it at some point in the future, but I know some bloggers do this.

I still remember the blog from the girl recounting her experiences training for a Spartan race, and training to run my own race I found a lot of value and encouragement from her thoughts.

But setting up the blog as a resource to educate and support other obstacle racing enthusiasts was never her intention, instead her blog was a promotional tool to support fundraising efforts to her family and friends audience, with the end goal to extract as much cash from their pockets as possible.

I was the exception, being the weirdo blogger who’d randomly stumbled upon them and was leaving comments alongside granny thinking I’d found some sharing my interest.

Once the race was done, so was the blog.

Years ago I realised my blog didn’t have to be about having a higher meaning, I didn’t have to be a disruptor, I didn’t have to change the world, and despite all the hype I didn’t need to turn my blog into a second source of income.

In my writing I gave myself permission to explore what I wanted to at the risk I could be writing into a void.

My blog became an extension of me, writing about things on my mind, or sharing lessons learnt the hard way, in the hope someone would get some value from my observations.

No start and end to the cause, no permanent defined niche that is going to turn me into an expert and make me rich, just evolving and growing as I go through life, with good intentions that I’ll be writing my last post all the way to the end!

10 Years of Perfect Manifesto

Every blog anniversary I tend to reflect on how far I’ve come and normally make the same observations to really hammer home how long I’ve been doing this…

The relationship with my blog is longer than that of my life… it’s older than both my kids ages combined… it’s outlasted seven jobs…

But this year I’ve been thinking more about where it all started, and those original bloggers who followed and commented on my blog.

So many great blogs, so many talented writers, so many idealists like me who just wanted to make some difference, who one day just disappeared.

Being connected to these folks only through blogging world, means they might well have fallen off the face of the earth, making a tiny impression on a miniscule part of my life.

I don’t know what happened to Benjamin, he hasn’t blogged in years, but hope he is taking that huge positive enthusiasm somewhere to lead his own mission somewhere.

For me though I continue to think about what the future of blogging holds for me.

At 10 years of doing this, I’m well past the stage of thinking this could become my living, but I do have all the other ups and downs which impact my desire to keep going.

Last year was a bad one, and at times with blogging it felt like a make or break year.

With so many challenges in my personal life, it became a struggle to find time to write, and when I did I felt creatively spent, or that I no longer felt blog writing fit.

Despite the setbacks, and and continued challenges to my time, I found a way, because I wanted this to work, like a rough patch in a marriage I was fighting to make it through, until better days would come again.

Doing this isn’t something you can do without sacrifice, and I’ve given up ample time, and time I could have spent with others because I didn’t want to miss that weekly Wednesday deadline, which in itself is ridiculous because I’m the one who set it, and there are no major implications – no one is disappointed, no one dies if I miss it.

You do this on the understanding without reimbursement, a reality lost on many blogger that most hobbies you do are done without getting anything return (except learning, satisfaction, stress relief, connections… I could go on).

What you write is not guaranteed success, I have plenty of posts in the bowels of my blog archives hidden away for all eternity never to break 10 views.

I’ve written what I believe to be my best posts and had to learn to cope with the disappointment when they don’t get the adoration I believe they deserve.

Also I’ve had to manage the frustration of posts written in a 30 minute lunch break, going on to be the most popular things, and accounting for 90% of my sites views.

I write without because I believe in the importance of words, sharing ideas, creating, and doing something that will make mine, and the lives of others reading better.

And if that isn’t a blog mission – then I don’t know what is?

Thank you for your ten years of support,

Let’s see where to go next.

Wishing you the best in your success,

James @Perfect Manifesto

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