Do they have something to say, or is this like "I want to be in a band" of a previous generation?
Many people get caught up in thinking the blog, YouTube, or podcast is the thing, when it’s just the thing that lets you share the real thing. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really integrate this lesson.
I think putting more questions and uncertainty in the way of actually just writing/podcasting/youtubing is what stops a lot of people really building the habit in the first place.
I think understanding what you want to share helps solve the major stumbling block that leads to thousands of blogs with one entry that is effectively hello-world. If told to draw anything, most people will sit with a blank page. However, if they are told to draw a castle, those bounds give them the freedom to start and create, and it can evolve from there.
What are you into to? What hobbies do you have? What do you know, or have opinions about, that others might be interested in? This is your theme, the “real thing”. Writing, podcasting, or video production, without this usually falls flat after 1 or 2 attempts, and it makes it impossible for a habit to form.
If you’re already into something and doing it on a regular basis, then you’re just writing about, talking about it, or recording what you’re already doing or thinking about all the time anyway. The content and ideas can flow more easily, especially at the beginning. Not to mention, being more motivated to make the content, since it’s already a passion.
So many people are trying to make content about nothing, because they aren’t really doing anything else… and this is where friction is born. Do something you find interesting, then share that thing and your perspective on it. Start with the doing, not the sharing (writing, podcasting, and YouTubing is the sharing).
Hopefully this clarifies what I was getting at and resolves the chicken/egg thoughts.
all this conversion and optimization of texts for search engines turns bloggers into robots, and it is simply impossible to read the texts, they are not human, they are as if created by neural networks. who needs this hypocrisy?
you should blog, and by a blog definition that is going on the internet. to get more people to read it (often the goal) the easiest thing to do is utilize the tool people use to find things on the internet (search engines).
if there are issues with spam, keyword stuffing, forever run-on paragraphs of nothingness, well that is the search engine algorithm's job to fix. And they have a lot of money to fix it.
and if they don't fix it we should use a new search engine. it'll take time. but those seem like the dynamics at play in this scenario.
People started blogs for that? I thought that was more the realm of supermarket bulletin boards next to the firewood flyer.
Maybe I'm just from a previous previous generation.
How can "a friend" post something on a supermarket bulletin board now that they don't seem to exist?
“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”