I have a Substack + SEO thoughts
Hi guys! I'm back. I know I've been away for a year on Bearblog, hope you didn't miss me too much!
I've still been writing on Blogger over the past year, and I've enjoyed it a lot. The only thing that may have irked me a bit is struggling to get my voice out there, what with the internet right now being a sea of slop and unoriginal content. However, that's also a me thing, and it's something I'm looking to work on.
Bearblog doesn't really have that issue because it's all a bit of a self-contained ecosystem. I've been checking out the trending page almost every day this past year, and I've been quietly relieved, and occasionally miffed, at seeing how Bearblog's not changed that much. The top posts are still about how bad AI is, how Bearblog is awesome, how you can be more productive, etc. And I don't disagree with that, but it does also annoy me how hard it is for people who don't cater to the trending page to get their voices heard. It feels like you need to title your posts in a certain way to get some attention. It feels like SEO, weirdly enough - wait, I thought the IndieWeb existed to not have to worry about that, haha.
But on a serious note, I do love Bearblog, and I sometimes wonder if I needed to leave it in the first place. When I wrote my last post, I was in a rough place. I felt anxious about myself and my place in the world, and I was heading into uni only a few weeks later. I only got back into blogging proper two months later, and even that was a slow process. But I got back in nonetheless, and I'm even writing fiction now, too. I fell in love with writing again, somehow.
And in celebration of that, I started a Substack. I'm not sure if you Bearbloggers would approve of that, whether Substack is too mainstream or not. But I decided to write a post thinking about how I've been writing for the past three years, and whether I really need to care so much about SEO or not. One common theme in my blogging has been just that - should I cater towards Google and all the other search engines, or is it easier to prioritise myself? I'm still getting to grips with that, and I've supposedly been blogging for three years!
I hope you like my Substack post! I also hope you enjoy reading my stuff, maybe even sometimes feel compelled to share it with someone :D. But yes, this blog is back...and I'm a bit surprised by that.
Substack is here. And my Guestbook is still open!