What I want to get out of blogging

It has been a whole week since I started my blog! When I first started this blog, I made a post which spoke about why I started the blog. So, one week in, I wanted to take a few moments now to reflect on what I want to achieve from the blogging experience. Here are these goals.

Hobby

Simply put, I wanted to have something to do. Being creative is always something I’ve loved doing, and my favourite type of hobby has always been one where I can be hands-on and have an end result that I created.  I’ve also always loved writing, so having a blog where I can accumulate and chronologise my writings on a blog seemed like a perfect hobby for me. A bonus is that I can also write blog posts about my other hobbies! It’s a win-win situation.

Network

I think it will be a great experience to read other blogs that pique my interests and interact with other blogs! I have already been browsing tags in the reader and have read many blog posts that I liked. Since I now have a blog, I’d like to be more active in liking and commenting on others’ blog posts. I think ending up with a network of bloggers would be a great addition to the blogging experience! And if you are reading this right now, please do feel free to comment on my posts!

Writing

As I mentioned above, I love writing! It is something that I have always enjoyed and felt I was good at. It is also something which I don’t do nearly as often as I should, especially considering how much I enjoy it! Since starting this blog a week ago, I have written more for leisure than I have in the past few weeks. Actually, more like the past few months (oops). I am really loving the feeling of writing again and I do hope to continue it. Having a blog means that I have more of an incentive to write: if I write something, then I can edit it and publish it on my blog!

Skills

As well as having the blogging experience and the experience of writing regularly, I also am looking forward to the skills I will gain. I think I will gain and improve my skills in the following areas:

• writing – particularly practice in writing in different styles
• research – for if/when I am writing a blog post that requires research
• wordpress – wordpress is a platform that I had heard of but had no real experience with, so having this blog effectively enables me to have first-hand experience
• editing – especially because I am sending my writing out into the world and so it is not only me who may read these posts
• time-management/self-management– especially if I am working with self-imposed deadlines

Knowledge

I love learning new things! One of the main reasons I wanted to start a blog was so that I could post about things I learnt. This would work mutually. I would be able to learn things and then post what I learned, and I would also be able to actively seek out knowledge, synthesise it, and write it into a blog post. I hope to do more of this in the future. Currently, I have already written one such blog post, which was about the 5 r’s of recycling.

As it is still early on in the life of this blog, I really cannot say for certain if I will achieve my above goals. I guess all I can say is that I hope I do, and I will work towards achieving them.

Thanks for reading!

k