blog monetization

I literally cannot believe this, but… this is the 1,000th blog post to be published on girlyjuice dot net. WOW.

This somehow feels like a more momentous milestone to me than more time-based ones, because just saying “I’ve been blogging for eight and a half years” doesn’t give you a whole lot of info about what that has actually entailed. But it’s a whole different ballgame when I say it this way: I’ve been blogging here for 3,114 days, and have written 1,000 blog posts in that time, which averages out to 2.25 blog posts per week EVERY WEEK for nearly a decade. Yeesh. I’m so proud of myself that I’m not even trying to rein in the congratulatory self-indulgence in this paragraph!

With that in mind, I know a lot of bloggers and other types of writers follow me here, so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned about creating massive amounts of blog content over multiple years. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve always found my way back to it whenever I strayed or slacked for a while. Here are some tips that I hope help you if your goal is to make it to 1,000 blog posts or beyond!

Pick a subject you’re enthralled by. Maybe don’t start a blog about, like, 18th-century Viennese architecture, unless you’re actually so captivated by it that you think you have several dozen blog posts’ worth of thoughts to share on the topic. The vast majority of blogs burn out – and while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (I know not everyone is aiming to make their blog their job, as I have), if you’re in it for the long haul then it’s best to set yourself up for success. I chose to center this blog around sexuality because I could think of literally zero other subjects that I genuinely felt I could keep writing about forever, and it turns out I was right: the landscape of human sexuality is always changing, and so is my own sexuality specifically, making it a rich vein of blog post ideas.

…but also, don’t limit yourself to one subject. If this blog was only a sex blog, I don’t think it would be boring, exactly – there are infinite subtopics within the field of sexuality – but it certainly would be less fun for me at times. I’m only human; I’m not always horny. Sometimes I’m too depressed or ill or heartbroken to contemplate sex, and that’s typically when I dive into writing about relationships, fashion, feminism, or mental health. Thanks very much to the ladies of the Blogcademy for introducing me to the idea that your blog can be like a magazine: geared toward a particular type of reader, and the topics (yes, plural) that they’d be interested in.

Develop a storage system for ideas. Frustrating but true: far too often, when you have a fantastic idea for a blog post but are too busy to jot it down, you’ll end up totally forgetting about it. Either it’ll languish forever in the back of your mind – “I really should write that one of these days!” – or you will actually forget you even had the idea in the first place. It’s crucial that you develop a way to collect all your random blog post ideas somewhere so you can use ’em later. I try to always jot down not only the title/main idea of the post, but also a few notes about its contents; for example, for this post, I wrote down “how to write 1,000 blog posts” followed by a few bullet points about the kinds of tips I was hoping to give. This helped jog my memory later when I sat down to actually write this post.

Develop regular features. I do a “Monthly Faves” at the end of each month, “12 Days of Girly Juice” at the end of each year, and have experimented with various other recurring features in the past. These are especially helpful when you’re going through a period of being extra stressed/busy/sapped of all creativity (hello, 2020!) because they give you structure and some kind of prompt. You don’t have to come up with 1,000 completely unique and different ideas to write 1,000 blog posts (although kudos if you can)!

Read social media, forums, and the news. Not all the news, certainly (god, I think my brain would explode from sadness oversaturation), but at least enough to know what’s going on in your field at any given time. You never know when a random news story might thrill/incense/sadden/alarm you into writing something brilliant. Keeping an eye on social media and relevant forums also helps you keep your finger on the pulse of what people actually do/feel/think, not just what mainstream news says people are doing/feeling/thinking – so you can answer questions a lot of people are wondering about, provide guidance on issues that confuse most folks, or unpack your own feelings on the hot-button issue of the day.

Talk to friends, family, partners – and people you disagree with. Conversations have been some of my best catalysts for good blog posts over the years. Sometimes all it takes is a simple statement like “I’ve been thinking about writing a piece on [insert vague topic here]…” and before you know it, you’ll be in a profound dialogue or heated debate with someone about the issue at hand. Often, conversations with smart people – whether or not they know much of anything about my chosen topic – can help me figure out a unique angle, an offbeat consideration, or a hot take. It’s most useful to converse not only with people you like, but also people who rub you the wrong way, because they may offer you a perspective you’d never considered before, or present a perfect ideological springboard for your argument. (Just don’t get sucked into debating alt-right trolls as if their arguments have any merit… Been there, done that; it’s never worth it.)

Pay attention to readers’ search terms. Certain services, like Google Analytics, allow you to see what search-engine queries lead people to your website. These are always illuminating; they tell you not only what you’re already helping people with, but also what you could be helping people with. Obviously, not all blog content needs to be helpful to the reader in order to be valid and good, but informational and “how-to” articles are often the most “shareable,” so it makes sense to focus on them at least some of the time. If you notice that a lot of your readers seem to be fruitlessly searching for answers to the same questions, maybe that’s a cue that you should answer those questions for them in a blog post.

Take the money (if you want to). It’s simply a fact of life in a capitalist society that you will be more able to devote time and energy to an activity if that activity pays. Not everyone gets to a point with their blog where it starts attracting hopeful advertisers – and sometimes that’s due to entire industries or genres of writing being chronically undervalued, which sucks – but if you do start getting that type of offer in your inbox, at least consider it. Some people are very hesitant to “sell out,” especially within a vocation that they adore, because they think money will drain the joy out of the whole endeavor – which indeed can and sometimes does happen. But for me, getting paid to blog has almost always just been a motivator. The more income I’ve earned through this site, the more I’ve been able to set aside other jobs and projects to focus on what I’m doing here – and (for me at least) that results in better, deeper, more interesting work.

Allow yourself to grow and change. While it can be tempting to stick with a successful formula once you’ve found one, your best writing will happen when you step outside the box you’ve inevitably created for yourself. Any reader who’s actually invested in you as a person will happily follow you into new territory (so long as you haven’t, like, taken the red pill or joined a pyramid scheme), and to the extent that you lose old readers when you switch things up, you’ll also gain new ones who are more in line with your present-day vision. I certainly would not have been able to write 1,000 blog posts solely from the limited perspective of the 19-year-old sex nerd I was when I started this blog – but writing 1,000 blog posts from my ever-shifting perspectives from ages 19 to 28? That was no problem at all.

What strategies have you found helpful in long-term blogging?