Blogging Thoughts - Some Re-evaluation

I didn’t post anything on wanderingjustin.com this week – no travel tips, no lists of cool places to go, not so much as a snarky list about the odd courtship rituals of my mountain bike brethren.

That’s because I’m having a blogging crisis. I’m angst-ridden over the disconnect between the real me and the wanderingjustin.com me. For the most part, my writing here doesn’t sound – at least to me – like the guy my friends know.

There are some reasons why I’ve allowed this to happen:

I discovered search engine optimization. And I’ve let it run amok. I respect the benefits of SEO and I’ll still employ some of its practices. But I have to write for people. I think this happens to a lot of people in the continuum of their blogging experience.
I’ve tried to be too — correct. When my blog started gathering steam, sites like USAToday.com and The Chicago Tribune would sometimes scoop up my content. That sort of thing is great for traffic and advertising. I wanted it to happen more often, so I started to censor myself. I became very unlike the guy who is the subject of this quote: “It’s not a party until Justin tells a story about his balls.”
I’ve been lazy. It’s easy to be informative. It’s not so easy to entertain. It takes effort to summon the same energy of a spur-of-the-moment quip into a blog post. I rarely see the same phrasing and rhythm here that I’ll unleash verbally on someone who’s known me a long time. I have to put more energy into blogging. At least, on a post-by-post basis.

There. The upshot is that for awhile I’ll likely post less until I practice being the real me a bit more. I’m aiming for one super-good post every week. In recent months, I was at two – down considerably from the random days when anything could happen.