Is Blogging Still Useful to a Writer?

Seven years ago, about when I started blogging, I knew many other novelists who shared tips and trials on blogs.

Then Facebook and Twitter burst onto the scene, and I know many friends who are still active on those. Personally, I am a little worried about the future of those platforms. Once a corporation starts messing around with their algorithms to manipulate rather than serve their users, I begin to feel like a cog in someone else’s machine. I’ve started an account over at Minds.com, and I hope you’ll click my link (it’s an affiliate link, so I get brownie points or something cool) and sign up so I have some friends there. I hate going to a new social media platform and feeling like I’m at a school dance, blinking at the strobe lights and crowd and feeling more lonely than if I stayed home. The format is pleasant, and more importantly, I hope that platform will stay committed to seeing its users as human beings, not food pellets for conglomerates. I also hope they will maintain their commitment to freedom of speech, as it seems that everywhere you turn these days, the large social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and even Apple, are selling out freedom of speech to please governments.

Having been away from my blog for a while, I naturally wondered if it was worth reviving it, or if blogs are “so 2010” these days. I idly googled if anyone was still blogging and found this interesting list of top money-earning bloggers for 2017.

First thing I noticed was that, yeah, I was a regular visitor to one of these blogs (Pat Flynn). And I know that he doesn’t just blog. He also runs a podcast, for instance. And he has a book. That’s interesting, and it just goes to show that no matter where you start, as an artist-entrepreneur, you should expand into multiple media as well as onto multiple platforms.