5 Lessons Learned from My First Year of Blogging
It was one year ago today that I launched my blog on Medium.
Friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have always reacted to my knowledge of pop culture with a mixture of awe and confusion. Many of these same folks have encouraged me to try blogging over the years with little success. But something changed in the lead-up to the 90th Annual Academy Awards, when I decided that for once my predictions of the winners and reflections on the show would not be crammed into a lengthy Facebook post, but rather a proper blog. Interestingly, the impetus to finally launch the blog came from an unlikely source — my husband’s coworkers, who always enjoyed my Facebook posts providing my thoughts on major Hollywood events and thought I should share them with a larger audience.
Since March 4, 2018, I published 51 articles. I did not plan to publish my 52nd article 52 weeks to the day after I launched my blog, but it’s an amusing coincidence that I did.
My blog has not exactly exploded, but in my judgment it has gained enough traction to be a worthwhile endeavor. At the time I published this article, my articles have been viewed 14,215 times and read in full 4,912 times. I have amassed 252 followers on Medium and made a whopping $197 in payments through the Medium Partner Program. I have written 25 articles about film, 14 about television/streaming, and 12 about music. At various points, I was a “Top Writer” on Medium in 6 different content areas — Movies, Television, Culture, LGBTQ, Diversity, and Feminism.
And while I’m rattling off numbers, here’s another one — 5. Upon some reflection, that’s the number of significant lessons that I learned in my first year of blogging.
Lesson #1: Fear of the Trolls is More Detrimental than the Trolls Themselves
The primary thing that kept me from starting a blog sooner was undoubtedly the fear of negative reception. Interestingly, it was not necessarily fear that people would criticize my writing or vocally disparage my opinions, but rather that people would denigrate me. Any scroll through a Twitter feed (more on Twitter later) or the comments section of a news article (note: it is unwise to do this under any circumstances) expose you to extraordinary levels of ignorance, bigotry, and vitriol. I questioned whether it was worth opening myself up to all that negativity.
But, in reality, I can count on less than two hands the number of negative responses I received during my first year. Those I did get were your run-of-the-mill trolls that were easy to ignore, dismiss with a clapback, or simply block. Everything else was either a thoughtful disagreement, a compliment, or a non-sequitur.
Of course, the lack of vitriol and disparagement could be partly accounted for by the fact that I don’t really have much of a following…
Lesson #2: Self-promotion is a Necessary Evil
The knowledge that I would have to engage in routing self-promotion to gain a following for my blog was the second factor that kept me from starting one for so long. I don’t have the massive aversion to the spotlight being on me that some do, but I really don’t like begging the spotlight to come my way. But I knew that if I wanted my writing to reach a wider audience, I pretty much had to self-promote. That meant annoying my friends with social media posts, being active on the blogging site, and — most dreadfully — delving into Twitter.
I had only tweeted a handful of times prior to starting my blog. I disliked it on principle. How could you possibly say something meaningful in 140 characters (or even the new upper limit of 280)? Why put so much effort into getting strangers to notice me and like me? (Few, if any, of my friends and colleagues have been active on Twitter over the years.) But nevertheless, I knew it was a great way to promote articles, engage with pop culture, and find communities of people with similar interests. So I reluctantly jumped into the Twitter morass. It wasn’t quite as soul-sucking as I feared, but it did prove to be an addictive time-sink that occasionally had far more influence on my mood than it should have.
Nevertheless, there have been definite benefits of becoming active in the Twitterverse. Primary among these were getting shoutouts from people I have long-admired like Oscar nominee Richard E. Grant and Murphy Brown creator Diane English and discovering a number of great journalists, essayists, and bloggers that I likely never would have found otherwise.
Lesson #3: Timing is Everything
Part of self-promotion is being timely. I quickly learned that if I waited too long after some sort of pop culture event to comment, interest in what I had to say would rapidly dwindle. Thus, I constantly had to be prepared when awards showed aired, big films were released, or a particular controversy ignited Hollywood. This reality gave me immense respect for the people who (unlike me) make this type of writing their full time job. It is utterly exhausting to be that responsive to the news and it takes a lot more skill than I ever imagined to create a hot take that is well-reasoned, adequately sourced, reasonably objective, and entertaining.
Lesson #4: Vulnerability is Essential
Of course, not all of my articles were immediate responses to Hollywood happenings. In fact, the articles of mine that garnered the most passionate responses were undoubtedly the ones in which I bared a bit of my soul.
When I wrote about the emotional impact of LGBT milestones like Ellen’s “Puppy Episode,” Brokeback Mountain, The Hours, and Love, Simon I received a number of heartwrming responses. People contacted me to tell me that what I wrote moved them. They shared their own stories. They suggested other things to watch and read.
Although these pieces are immensely rewarding, crafting them tends to take an emotional toll. It is far easier for me to rehash obscure pop culture knowledge, critique a film, recount a concert, or predict the winners at an upcoming awards show then to put into words how a piece of art spoke deeply to me at a specific point in my development. This is undoubtedly because of the vulnerability such pieces entail. They require me to not only dig deep, but also to expose pieces of myself — my identity, my history, my insecurities, my longing — to the unknown masses.
Lesson #5: Blogging is Unexpectedly Empowering
As I reflected on Lesson #4, I realized that even when my blog posts involve little in the way of autobiographical detail, they require a certain degree of vulnerability.
For most of my life, sharing opinions has been something that frightened me. This has especially been true when the opinions were shared publicly and when they were ones that people are likely to disagree with. These fears undoubtedly stem from the fact that I dedicated so much time and emotional energy during the first three decades of my life to pleasing people, appearing “normal,” and desperately trying not to rock the boat.
Regardless of the cause of the malady, blogging has proven a helpful remedy. It involves repeatedly doing something that frightens me and testing out whether my mind’s fearful predictions are based in fact (they are not; see Lesson #1). In this way more than any, I have found blogging to be incredibly empowering.
On the one year anniversary of my first blog, I am particularly grateful for all those who provided encouragement to me over the years and all those who engaged with things that I wrote over the past year. A hearty thanks to you all.
Now, I am going to take a few weeks off. Unless, of course, something really really interesting happens…