Knock Knock – Remember Me?

Hi, hello, it’s me. Lisa. The Procrastinating Mum. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I just checked, and the last time I uploaded a post was July 2022! Not even 2023!! How has it been that long? I feel like that friend that just fell off of the face of the earth, with no contact, then comes back months later acting like nothing happened. I feel like I’m hiding behind the safety of the door, peeking my head through, making sure that I’m okay to come in.

So, what happened? Why did I disappear from the blogging world and leave my website to collect dust for almost 18 months? I make this big statement of the fact that I want to make a business out of my blog, then…nothing.

Well, there isn’t really one big reason for this, but many little reasons, which I’ll go into now.

Other Hobbies Took My Interest

I’ve always had quite a short attention span, so I was surprised that I had kept up blogging for so long. And when it got a little too much for me, I found other things that took my interest more, such as card-making with the Cricut, tracing my family tree, and cake-making. Each of these hobbies took up all my time, creative energy and money so I had nothing left to give to my blog.

Being A Mum To A Child With Autism

I understand that there are mums, dads and carers out there who are looking after more than one child and sometimes more than one child with additional needs. And they manage to work full-time and keep a house running. I seriously take my hat off to those people, I honestly don’t know how you do it. After a tough day with my son, once he’s gone to bed, all I want to do is mong out in front of a programme or film. I just don’t have the energy in the evening to write a post.

I Ran Out Of Ideas

Simple as that. I just don’t know what to write about anymore. Alternatively, I’ll have a few ideas, write up what I want to say, and find that I only had a few paragraphs with no idea how to bulk it out.

I Got Caught Up In The ‘Background Stuff’

There is a lot more to running a blog or website than just writing what’s in your head and hitting that publish button. Like, A LOT more. There is SEO to think about, advertising and promoting, spending time on social media to keep your presence up so more people see your stuff, taking pictures, keywords and keyword research, website maintenance, topic research and that’s just the stuff I can think of at the moment.

I was obsessed with increasing my DA (domain authority). This basically determines how ‘good’ and ‘trustworthy’ your website is. For example, Wikipedia currently has a DA of 94. Facebook is 96. The NHS website has 91. The higher your DA, the better chance you have of being on page 1 of Google, the more visitors you are likely to get, the better chance you have of making money because more people are on YOUR site.

Anyway, the more I tried to increase my DA and site speed, the more my DA went down. However, in the months that I have stopped fiddling around with my website, the better my DA has gotten.

Its Just Not That Simple

I knew, I really did know, that this wouldn’t be easy. But when you spend hours on a post, and you’ve done the research, written the best work you can, added all your affiliate links, promoted it everywhere, sent out emails, created bloody millions of Pinterest Pins, and it gets 31 views, it really does hurt, especially when it happens post after post after post. This takes me to my last two points.

It Lost It’s Fun

When I first started The Procrastinating Mum, I loved writing something each week. It felt like my own little diary that I could share with my friends. (This has just given me vivid memories of Slam books. Do you remember those?!) I enjoyed writing like that, but I read somewhere that blog content needs to be ‘evergreen’. In very basic terms, this means that your content needs to be relevant all year round, year after year, so that you can always gain readers. So, the posts I wrote about lockdown are pointless now, unless we go into another lockdown (please, God no!)

So, I changed my writing style and learned more about making blogging a business. And I enjoyed that. I loved learning everything that I could and putting out a different type of content.

But it lost its fun when I put everything I learned into practice, and nothing really changed. As I said above, there would be posts that I put so much effort into, and it wouldn’t take off the way I wanted. Affiliate links were left unclicked, call-to-action questions at the end of the posts were left unanswered and social media posts were left unloved. And this takes me to my last point.

I’m Not Good Enough, And That’s Okay

And I’ve accepted that. There will always be better writers and more informed people than me. I will never be as good as The Anna Edit or The Londoner, and that’s okay. I still enjoy writing (when I know what I want to talk about), and there are people who still enjoy reading what I write. So what if I have 100 readers or 100,000? As long as what I write about gives at least one person help, hope or a good laugh, then I’ve done what I set out to do when I wrote my first-ever post.

I’m trying to find a writing style that suits me, so expect to see a range of different posts from me in the future. I still have some half-finished from last year and some ideas of things that I find interesting that I’d like to talk about at some point.

I have no idea how often I’ll post going forward, but if you’re reading this, then thank you. Hopefully, I’ll catch up again with you soon.

But for now, that’s it. I need to cook dinner and wake my husband up from his nap, and my son wants me to read The Paper Dolls for the 47th time today!

Oh God, and do the bins. Christmas and New Year really confuse things with the bin days, don’t they?

Cover Photo by Amelia Bartlett on Unsplash