5 Tips to Help You Get Back Into Blogging

New Year’s Resolutions are difficult to keep, and we all know that most of them don’t survive the first month. Indeed, I had promised myself to blog more regularly, and, after a promising start, by the end of January my good intentions had vanished and my blog lay dormant once more.

This has happened to me twice before, and it has happened even more often in another area - art. Art projects involve a lot of work, especially the ones I idiotically pick for myself, so when something is off, it can be extremely tiresome to look at months and months of struggling with a project that no longer holds any value.

But recently, I feel like I have reached a better understanding of my art and I am no longer weighed down by ideas that have sizzled out before I have even put pen to paper. And I am sure that what I have learned in that field, I can transport to blogging as well.

This month, my blog has become active again, and I want to share with you what I have learned.

Know why you want to blog

Do you enjoy writing? Do you want to share tips or ideas to help other people? Are you attempting a challenge and want to be held accountable? Do you want to gain followers on social media? Or are you bored and there’s nothing else to do?

All of these are potential reasons to blog, and you need to know why you’re doing it. Knowing your ‘why’ will keep you motivated when you feel like giving up again. And knowing your why will help you deciding what your blog should be like.

For myself, I enjoy telling stories, and during the past few weeks, I kept coming up with things I wanted to write about, only to then realise that I no longer had an active blog on which to post it. I have attempted to experience more things in life (another, more successful, New Year’s Resolution of mine), and I know that I will want to keep sharing them.

Think about your blog’s direction

Now that you know why you want to blog, you will have a pretty good idea of what you want to share. Discover for yourself whether you enjoy posting about a wide range of topics or want to stay within a certain niche. Getting back into blogging after some time off is a great idea to rethink the direction your blog is going in, and changing things up might be cathartic. Remember, you want to keep up with it this time around, so be sure to take your blog somewhere you want to be.

I have decided to include this point for one good reason - it has been a big issue for myself.
My blog used to be dedicated only towards art, and whenever I hit an art block, I hit a blogging block as well. When I discovered that I missed blogging, I also discovered that I didn’t just want to blog about art anymore. I am interested in a lot of things, and while art may be the main one, I still want to express myself as a whole person. I have discovered this a few years ago on tumblr (yes, I am a tumblr person), and I don’t know why I never realised that it would be true for blogging as well. Oh, well. We live and learn.

Learn from past mistakes

Now that you have decided on your fresh new start in the blogging world, it’s time to be honest with yourself. Why did you stop in the first place? With your motivation and your direction clearly laid out, you want to make sure that you won’t encounter the same obstacles you did before.

Were you overly ambitious and wanted to write too many posts in too short a time? Did you run out of ideas? Did you procrastinate writing because your working space was not ideal? Did you forget to take some time off?

Define your previous problems and find ways to work around them. You will encounter many new issues, but you can make sure that you have a better strategy than last time.

For myself, I can blame my blog’s previous focus - and my scheduling issues. If this is a problem for you as well, I can recommend an excellent post right on this blog - Organisation Is Everything. It has helped me a lot in figuring out what I can do. Obviously, no plan is ever perfect, but at least I am much more prepared now than I have ever been.

Do some maintenance

If you have abandoned your blog for some time, some maintenance will be necessary. Are you still happy with your theme? Is everything still working? Is your info still accurate?

Remember that some time has passed. New data protection rules are in effect in the EU, and there are other changes that might affect you. Now is the time to update everything, so that further maintenance when your blog is up and running will be easier.

If, like me, you have decided that your corner of the internet will go into a new direction, you will also have to ask yourself whether you need to clean out some old posts that are no longer fitting, update some tags, or indeed start completely fresh. Remember, this is your corner - make it special in your own way. That you enjoy spending time there is the most important thing of this exercise.

Take time to start again

Is everything set? Are you ready to go? Now take your time. Collect new ideas for posts, write a couple of spare articles without posting them, get back into the flow of things. Ensure quality over quantity, and make sure that you can stick to the schedule you’ve set for yourself. And once you’re happy with everything, start posting again.

There’s no need to acknowledge your time off. Old readers will notice, and be happy you started again, new readers don’t need to know you’ve had to take a break. The only important thing now is to keep posting to keep them coming back.

I posted about the shift in my blog direction only because it is a major change - and because it is a story that I wanted to tell, which is the point of my blog after all.

If you had to stop blogging as well, I really hope that this post can help you get back into it. Writing can be helpful to get some thoughts out of your head, and meeting your readers is a fun thing to do. And that is how blogging should be - enjoyable.

Happy blogging!