Earlier this year, as summer started to get into full swing, I published a couple of posts that talked about getting back to pure blogging.
These posts – Why the Real Driver of Traffic is Content That Matters to You, and Pure Blogging and the Experience We Give Our Readers – saw me taking a step back and looking at how the chase for traffic, shares and monetization was making us forget the reason we started blogging in the first place.
Not for glory. Not for fame. Not for fortune. But for the sheer joy of writing (or video blogging, or podcasting).
The joy of just putting something out there, with no other agenda than to share your thoughts with the world, and see if anyone responded and started a conversation with you.
It’s the direction my own blog had been moving in for a while (from its initial premise of marketing and social media topics), and – going by the comments after each of the two posts linked above – many others wanted to see a return to the “pure blogging” approach.
So, after thinking about it for a while, and talking with some fellow bloggers whose work and style I admired, I launched the Pure Blogging project.
And it’s one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve been part of.
It’s All About the Content
When you land on the Pure Blogging home page, one of the first things you’ll see is the bold tagline, “It’s all about the content.”
This is something that was the driver of the project to begin with (and remains that way today).
Instead of worrying about creating the kind of “viral content” [*cough*] that many bloggers and content creators are happy producing, Pure Blogging is the antithesis of that.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Here’s to Pure Blogging, where the only thing that matters is the content. #pureblogging” quote=”Here’s to Pure Blogging, where the only thing that matters is the content. #pureblogging”]
No buzzwords. No clickbait titles that have little (or nothing) to do with the post. No easy listicles like “Top 50 Content Rules for Content Marketers”, blah blah.
Nope. None of that would be encouraged at Pure Blogging.
Instead, it’d be what moves you at the time of writing.
It could be a personal story. A story about someone or something that shaped who you are today.
It could be about personal battles, or supporting those going through battles of their own.
It could be a story about faith (or how faith was lost).
It could be something as simple as why someone has so many pets.
The only caveat that I gave the folks kind enough to be part of the project was simple – no hate, bigotry, bullying, or any of that crap. Everything else was pretty much good to go.
Because of this open approach, Pure Blogging has resulted in some amazing posts, and the kind of topics that more often than not get bypassed in lieu of “content this”, “social media that”, etc.
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/1953-woody-old-spice/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/this-is-not-a-dress-rehearsal-this-is-your-life/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/a-question-of-faith-or-why-are-aliens-less-believable-than-religion/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/one-child-worth/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/wrestling-time-dinosaurs/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/the-day-i-died/
http://forbloggersbybloggers.com/a-writer-stops/
As you can see from these posts above, there’s a huge variety in the topics being discussed.
Some are funny, some are sombre. Some are introspective, some are optimistic. Others are somewhere in-between.
The one thing they all have in common, though, is they are written from the heart, and talking to you – the reader – as if you’re the only other person in the room.
In short, they’re pure blogging at its finest.
Rediscover What Blogging Can Be
There is absolutely nothing wrong with creating content for the masses. There is zero wrong with creating content that needs to be created a certain way to meet business goals.
That was never the reason Pure Blogging was started.
Instead, Pure Blogging came to be simply to counter the easy, lazy way of content creation that seems to be ever more pervasive today.
If shares, comment counts and page views are the goals by which you set your content strategy, then Pure Blogging is probably not for you.
Although, ironically, by ignoring all of these goals and simply concentrating on the content, Pure Blogging has a decent amount of each – go figure!
However, if you’re a fan of blogging from the heart; blogging that inspires; blogging that makes you think differently from when you first landed on the page… then I invite you over to check out the posts currently on the site.
You may just find you have a new favourite blog. Well, apart from this one, of course… 😉
And if you’re finding you want a change from writing for social proof metrics alone, and you want to get back to creating the content that really matters to you, there’s an open invite to be part of the team, which you can find here.
Here’s to Pure Blogging, where the only thing that matters is the content.