At 21 years old the internet is almost two decades older than me and I have no room to judge what type of content will or will not be relevant. The digital space is stuffed to the brim with exciting apps from Tik Tok to Twitter and as a creative it’s so hard to determine where to share my work and my experiences. So why with all these options out there already is it worth starting a blog, a decades old method of internet content? The truth is I have no idea.
But what I do know is why I am starting my own blog in 2021.
I am a young photographer and filmmaker trying to make my way in this world. However, I have had many creative struggles over the past year from the pandemic to my own more personal family crisis. As a result, it’s been very difficult to find some momentum and consistency with my creative projects throughout this turbulent period. My confidence has been really shaken with all of these paths laid out in front of me and not sure where to go or how to share the things I create.
I began looking for guidance from my usual source, from Youtube. I came across a video from Ali Abdaal, How Writing Online made me a Millionaire, where he talked about his difficulties in initially starting his blog in 2016 while he was still a college student. I won’t try to summarize his video (definitely give it a watch if you are considering starting a blog in any capacity), but I related so heavily to some of his fears in putting myself out there. The thoughts like, “What will my friends & family think?”, “Will I actually make anything original?” and ”Why would anyone read my stuff anyway?”, were all questions that have been bouncing around in my head. However, the benefits of starting out-weigh any fear that could be holding me back.
Ali’s main point towards the benefit of starting a blog was that it creates the space for you to learn how to articulate the ideas in your head and then share them with the rest of the world. This is one of the main reasons I am choosing to start this blog because at the very least it will be a practice in finding my own voice and going through the motions of creating and sharing something small everyday. In the video Ali recommends a book that has immensely impacted his life called Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. Needless to say I quickly bought the book and am now a huge advocate of it as well.
Kleon goes through and gives some great advice to any creative about trying to share your work and build a following. One thing particularly stuck out to me in his section ‘Share Something Small Everyday’ was on carving out a space on the internet for yourself that you can call your home base. With the bustle of every new social media app it’s often hard to keep up. But if you have your own domain that’s the central location for everything that you create, it can make the idea of sharing your work on the internet substantially less daunting. (Luckily it’s easier now more than ever to create your own good looking website with any one of the services out there on the internet).
In the same chapter Kleon discusses the idea that if you release something small everyday, like a blog post, that it can compound into something greater than you could even imagine. “One little blog post is nothing on it’s own, but publish a thousand blog posts over a decade, and it turns into your life’s work.” Not to mention that each time you add something onto the internet it’s sharing your work even while you sleep, 24/7, 365 days a year. Therefore the more you share the more you get seen.
I don’t pretend to have any of this figured out on my own. I realize that even going back and reading this article itself that I have so much to learn about what makes good internet writing, but that’s the point of all this. So that you can have a space to share and grow as you go down whatever path you wish to follow and carve out your own little section of the internet to call home. It is scary and difficult to start, but you must do it anyways and trust me you’ll be glad that you do.
- Matt Nickolaus