Sharing personal experiences has always been a fantastic way to alleviate stress and make beneficial connections with others. In times of personal upheaval, it’s quite natural to want to reach out to others to be heard. To keep everything bottled in is not healthy, and those closest to us are often not as receptive to hearing about our problems as we’d like. Blogging to heal and the therapy of sharing is open to a worldwide audience.
Book readers and movie goers do so for the vicarious experience a given story imparts. Reality TV fans often get carried away in situations that parallel their life in some way. On other levels, therapists and support groups can offer a much-needed ear to help others work through their problems. For a personal blogger (as opposed to a business blogger), sharing posts is a way to connect with others on the most human of levels. True connection requires vulnerability.
Lay a Solid Foundation
Before posts can be published, a variety of technological considerations need to be made. What web host will you go with? A basic package is fine for starters, and upgrades can always be made when traffic starts to pick up. Is your preferred domain name available? Take the time to thoroughly research effective site naming practices. Will you use WordPress, Blogspot, or some other blogging platform to build your site and publish your posts? While free versions of blogging platforms are available, they also come with downsides that paid platforms do not.
Take some time to also consider how you will get traffic to your new site. While there’s nothing wrong with publishing posts to satisfy the urge to share, that urge greatly diminishes when a blogger realizes nobody is visiting their site or sharing their posts. Give some thought into how you’ll capture addresses to build your email list.
To grow an audience, you may even have to pay for advertising. Consider boosting Facebook posts, Twitter ads, and even Google AdSense Campaigns.
Also, learn some SEO basics and try to be active on a few social media sites. You should know the keywords you need to rank for so that your stories will be read, things others in your niche are blogging about, and what kind of traffic they are seeing from those posts.
Know Your Purpose
Expressive writing serves many purposes beyond just sharing details of personal events. Before taking the personal blog plunge, ask yourself if your primary goal is to write a lot and merely get things off your chest. Beyond that, what sort of interaction will you seek from readers? Do you want to give advice or get advice? Possibly both? Beyond sharing your story, do you see yourself becoming an advocate for a given cause?
A certain amount of emotional distance is also required to write about personal issues. Ask yourself if you are ready to write about various events since doing so can often bring up raw emotions that the author may not be prepared to effectively process yet, let alone publish for the world to see. Even when a post is deleted, it still won’t be completely wiped of its online presence and association with your name and website.
Also, be aware of trigger words and phrases, and the effect they may have on others who are struggling with the same things you are. Consider their feelings, and how the words you use may impact them. Using the wrong words can result in readers not only leaving your blog in droves, but taking their friends with them.
Give to Get
To reap the most therapeutic aspects when blogging to heal, it’s necessary to acknowledge it’s not a one-way street. Unless your blog unexpectedly goes viral overnight, be prepared to do a lot of legwork to build a readership that goes beyond immediate family and friends. Give potential readers a reason to care about the posts you are sharing, and always remember that building an audience takes time.
Experiment with various ways of growing an audience. Aside from engaging posts, get involved with online communicates related to the topics you are sharing in your writing. Leaving comments on blogs can seem time consuming, but that is often the best way to start interacting with fellow readers as comment reciprocation is likely to take place. The variety of people one can meet via a personal blog is truly astounding.
Consider Privacy Concerns
You may or may not be comfortable using your full name. If using only your first name, ask yourself how easy it would be for someone to figure out who you are. It’s also possible to write under an assumed name, but to share real-life experiences by blogging to heal rings a bit hollow when the site is authored by an anonymous entity.
On the other hand, take great pains not to use the names of those close to you. Also, think twice about any identifying details you want to include. The person being written about may have unpredictable reactions, so be prepared for such occurrences.
During times of upheaval, sharing such experiences is often all a person has to help them feel grounded. Blogging can be a great source of self-medication, and it’s there for the taking for those who want to give it a try. It can be scary at first to share one’s honest experiences and opinions, but readers will respond well to such authenticity.
What are your thoughts on blogging to heal and the therapy of sharing?