Blogging for Beginners 101
A once-dreaded Writing Intensive course that opened my eyes to Medium, and my opinions of where I think the blogging world will go.
You know those required writing intensive courses that you have to complete before graduation? Oh yeah, the ones with boring topics and unnecessarily long essays, where you’re trying to come up with a word or page minimum on a dull topic you aren’t interested in?
Being a second semester senior and still having a WI to complete, I thought my blogging class, being a writit would be the most mundane class of the semester, just sitting there trying to listen to my teacher, looking out the window as Spring came, and wondering about where my future was taking me in the next few months after graduation (all while I was supposed to be paying attention in class.) Well, I can gladly say I was in maybe one of those courses, but this one definitely wasn’t it.
I was actually nervous to see what it was all about and the in’s and out’s of the “blogosphere.” Sure, I’ve read blogs before but I honestly could say I had never written a blog post in my life when I walked into class on the first day of my last semester, not thinking what I got myself into.
Medium was a great start getting into the blogging world. The simplicity, the ease of the whole process, it just made my life a lot easier when I was trying to figure out the content and how to develop it through each post.
Wordpress uses backgrounds and different fonts for each blog post, and while that can be great for other bloggers to attract and entice readers to view a blog, I was more focused on the beginning steps of blogging and getting my content just right, some posts I had luck with that and others, maybe not so much.
The commercialization aspect of Medium is another factor that sparked my interest in it. There aren’t any ads on the side of the page tempting you to buy something which I really like. Because of that, my first thought was that the people writing on Medium actually want to write what they are writing about, and aren’t just getting paid to promote a different brand in each post. Blogging is supposed to be about what you feel, and I personally think that money can make you say something you don’t necessary mean.
Sure, some bloggers actually do use a brand’s product and prefer it, but that isn’t always the case. And of course, some avid bloggers have a Call to Action section at the end to follow blogs like them or linking to social media, but it generally is a self-promotion area and doesn’t link to a company or product.
Now about the future of blogging, in general. I most definitely think it will still be popular in ten years, but I do think the content will be less important as it is now, and more about the graphics and pictures, unlike Medium’s current setup. Even now, when there are lengthy posts with several chunks of information, I have to sort of prepare myself to read the post. I have to make sure I’m paying attention to what I’m reading, or else instead of being a 3-minute read, it will turn into a 10-minute read.
Although some may be lengthy reads, a majority of the time, the blog posts that I remember liking had unique points to them that I hadn’t seen or read anywhere else. I think the future of blogging needs to be more like that, and I think it will be. There are so many of the same types of blogs that are written on mostly the same topics, but when there is a different approach to it or different content, that’s what makes a reader enjoy it and remember they liked the blog, to keep coming back for more, like this blog on Beyonce’s “ Lemonade” on Medium that was more insightful than so many others I had seen, which made me remember it. However, in the future of Medium and blogging, I think engagement will become much bigger than it already is, where feedback from a specific target audience will become more important than the amount of “likes” or “favorites” a person receives.
But after all the things I’ve learned in this class, do I think I’ll continue blogging? I can’t say what my future holds in 1, 5, or 10 years, but as of right now, I don’t see it as something I will dive into on my own anytime soon. It’s been a great run in the Medium and Blogging world, however, I don’t think I have anything to say worth reading outside of what I wrote about in class, which is why I even deleted my (once-used-to-post-every-thought) Twitter. But until I have something worth writing about to share to the world, I’ll stick with showing my personality through the Puppy SnapChat geolense for anyone who follows me.
