How have my blogging habits changed?

Top Ten Tuesday is currently hosted by artsyreadergirl and has weekly topics for bloggers to respond to and share. Click the link for more info and to read more submitted posts!

This week’s prompt is Ways in Which My Blogging/Review Style Has Changed Over Time. I don’t limit my blog to just book content (although that is most of it at the moment!), so I have a bit more to reflect on, although I have periodically written before about my changing approach to blogging over the last 3 years.

I got to 9.. with a tangent on the pitfalls of doing too well with SEO on the wrong subject!

1. I write shorter reviews. At first, I thought every book review had to have lots of analysis and be structured like an essay, but I don’t have time for that. Sometimes I’ll write a longer and more thought-out post (I have a category for those) if the book inspired it (and I found the time!), but most of my reviews are brief but I’ll still always try to collect a few bullet points on what I did and didn’t resonate with.

2. I add a summary at the bottom of my book reviews. This is for Future Alice as a quick TL:DR reminder of my thoughts for when I’m looking back through reviews after I’ve forgotten all about the book!

3. I dropped Bookstagram. Too much effort, and it wasn’t any fun. I wrote about it here.

4. I make a little graphic review for my reviews, which started on Instagram, and then I moved them all here, and I still like making them because they help me summarise my thoughts. Plus, I do enjoy playing with Canva! Occasionally, I switch up my template design, you may have noticed I’ve tweaked it recently (I’m in my label tape phase).

5. I can now happily ignore all advice on blogging and do whatever the hell I want because I keep this website as a hobby, for my own benefit, and I have no interest in monetising it and turning it into a chore! It took me a while to realise this (I wrote about it here), and periodically I write a post to remind myself!

Actually, how the meaning or perception of blogging has changed over the years has been on my mind lately. I read a couple of recent posts by Liz Tai on her thoughts on “blogging” vs keeping a “digital garden” and her frustration that these days people think a blog is a marketing or personal branding tool instead of a simple tool for self-expression, as it used to be. Actually, let’s make this number 6.

6. I don’t waste any time or energy on SEO! In the early days, I still had the AIOSEO plugin installed, and I’d read a load of the shitty advice about starting a blog and I thought I had to do all the SEO stuff.

Unfortunately when I wrote my review of Atomic Habits, I still had some of that shit in my head so if you read that post you’ll see I have SEO friendly post title and headings and it does well through Google search and is by far my most visiting post. You’d think that’d be good but it’s really a pain in that arse because it brings people to my blog that aren’t my “audience” (I like to think my audience is people who understand what a true personal blog is, and I don’t think there is much crossover with James Clear fans there) and means I have to deal with a comment – roughly one a month (or a few a week in January!) – from someone upset that I wrote a critical review of their favourite self-help book (this fucking book, honestly).

I got one of these this morning (so upset they wrote two rude comments), and I again was wondering if I want to turn off the comments on there or try to edit it so it’s less friendly to the SEO robots! The thing is though for every shitty comment I get I get a really lovely one from somebody who had the same problems with that book which reminds me why I like to write and share these things.

Are the positive and in good faith comments worth the argumentative and rude ones? It depends on which day you ask me!

So I don’t know what I want to do with that post, and it’s made me very wary of doing well in Google search results!… But yeah, where I was successful at SEO, it has brought me grief because I get periodically stressed out by confrontational comments.

[Side note: I do really want to write a follow-up to my thoughts on Atomic Habits because 3 years later I’ve had some breakthrough thoughts and I think I’m better able to reflect on the problems I found with it and I think it’d be an interesting exercise! … But you know I have to find the time to work on that!]

7. I don’t microblog any more. The community on Mastodon really did help me understand what I wanted to get out of blogging, but I rarely microblog there anymore. My only posts are auto-posted from this blog. Sometimes I think I want to microblog my days, but it’s a whim that never lasts very long, and I already have enough things I’m trying to do in my day without adding a social media feed back in. I don’t even really look at Mastodon any more. I stopped when Trump got his second term because it just became flooded with depressing and disturbing news from America (no matter what keywords I tried to filter out!), and I’ve not missed it.

8. I am trying to engage more with blogging communities. It took quite a while to figure out how to do that -and how to find other blogs! – but I’ve been enjoying doing some challenges (like WeBlogPoMo last year) and taking part in Top Ten Tuesday, of course! It’s nice to “see” other people out here, and I’d like to do more tags and whatnot.

9. I tried and dropped SubStack. I thought it might be a way to do a newsletter and find other blogs to read and engage with, but I didn’t find it fun there. The algorithm just pushed the same blogs that already have huge platforms, so it was really difficult to find the smaller, more interesting (to me) stuff. It just made it feel kind of cliquey, like there was this set of Cool Kids everyone was begging for attention. I just didn’t like the vibe (and this was way before all the Nazi stuff!). My thoughts on leaving SubStack are here.

Plus, WordPress made it way easier to offer a newsletter and for subscribers to manage what they want to receive, and I think that works better anyway. I have played about with different “newsletter” style compilation posts over time (this old tag), my current iteration of this is my “digest” post (which maybe I should tag, this is my latest one.. I’m a few weeks behind), which I’ll write every week or so, just to catch up on what I’ve got going! I find those really fun to write.

10. I stopped caring about everything I hit publish on being perfect. Almost everything is a first draft; this post sure is! It’s probably riddled with typos and bad grammar, and maybe bits don’t make sense. I’ll probably read this back tomorrow and edit it after it’s live, or maybe I’ll forget all about it. That’s OK with me, if I had to take the time to carefully edit everything, I’d never post anything.

I am amazed I got to 10 and it’s now past bedtime, as once again, I failed to prepare a draft for this one ahead of time. That is not something that has changed with my blogging habits, though I have always been inconsistent and never stuck to a schedule!