Last week when I was gathering information for my newsletters I realized I had unknowingly arrived at a milestone. 5 years. I have been writing and sharing a piece on my blog each week for 5 years. Approximately 1,000 words a week, 260 times in a row. Without missing a single one. That’s a lot of words. That’s pretty significant.

Lately, I’ve been debating my choice to continue my blog. It takes me quite a bit of time to pull these thoughts, words, and graphics together each week. (Approximately 4ish hours a week). And while it is something I enjoy, it doesn’t directly make me any money. And as an authorpreneur, that is a major consideration when choosing the tasks I spend time on. I’m my own boss. The CFO as well as the Director of Marketing. For the longest time, the streak was my driving force. I’d done this thing for so long. I didn’t want to quit when things got tough because I’d added additional content creation (hello YouTube) to my agenda. I didn’t want to stop because I like routine and structure. And honestly, I just like writing it.

But I think the time has come for me to truly take stock of this blog and its role in my current authorpreneurship.

Here are the good things

Blogging is a task that brings me credibility and authority in my field.
Blogging creates fodder to share on my social media channels and in my eNewsletters.
Adding a new blog post to my website on a regular basis improves my SEO and Google Rank.
Writing weekly keeps my skills sharp and my knowledge of the industry/best practices/resources up-to-date.

Here are the not-so-good things

Blogging is a time consuming portion of my work week.
I am not sure how many people actually read my blog or have accessed the posts I have written in the past.
My blog is not making me any money.

So what do I do?

As I have now reached the five year mark I don’t feel as badly about ending my streak. I did a thing. I did it well… for a long time. I learned a lot. I improved as a writer. My graphic design has grown leaps and bounds. I’ve reached new readers, writers and teachers and brought them into my word nerd community. Stopping now won’t change any of that. Lots of people change their paths - starting new adventures or ceasing endeavors that aren’t serving them anymore.

At a church vision and leadership meeting I once participated in an activity called “Grow, Hold, Fold” in which we decided which activities and endeavors we wanted to Grow (increase scope/frequency/size), Hold (stay the course) or Fold (quit or scale back). As a one woman show it is impractical for me to think that I can grow in multiple areas (YouTube/new books) while still maintaining everything else that already took up my full time hours (and then some). Perhaps blogging is something I am going to fold?

I guess I’m not ready to commit to that. But instead of creating any new content right now, I think I’m going to dig back into my archive and curate collections of past pieces that I think readers would find beneficial and interesting. I’m doubting there is a single soul that has read all 260 of my posts. By bringing a few of my older pieces back into the spotlight, I will fulfill my mission of helping other writers by giving content already written a second life. These collections will still take time to put together, but likely less time than writing something entirely new. And if I get the itch to write a new post, there’s no one saying I can’t. (I’m the boss, remember?)

I’ll conclude by saying that I do still think blogging is valuable. If you have been thinking about it, I would fully support that choice. (Here is a downloadable guide to get you started!) Blogging is valuable in so many ways… I just think I might have explored and exhausted all of those assets over the past five years and for me… it’s time for a change.

For now, I think I’ll try this new model (repurposing past posts). See how it feels. Keep your eyes peeled on my social media for updates to this new blogging plan and the collections of posts I curate. If you’ve got a particular area of writing you’d like help with, shout it out in the comments and I’ll work on gathering my best tips, techniques, resources and pieces of advice for you.

So, what do you think?

Do you have a long time habit/routine you’ve given up because you don’t feel it served you anymore? How did it go? Did you go back? I’d love to hear about your experiences.

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My very FIRST blog post, way back in 2016.

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