I have been blogging for over 10 years now and in blogging world that’s a long time. In fact in blogging world I have literally got nowhere.

I have barely any followers, I don’t make any money whatsoever and I have very little engagement on my blog. In blogging world I am a total failure but because I have the right skill set I have the capability of making something of myself.

Great! Or is it?

I recently saw a tweet that got me thinking.

Being a blogger is all about being completely motivated & wanting to make it big or deciding to quit forever.

THERE IS NO INBETWEEN.

Wow. What a load of toss!

What happened to blogging for fun? For yourself and nobody else? When did it all become about being some form of online celebrity?

I reached out to a few of you recently for advice. I currently use WordPress.com on just a personal plan. I was thinking about moving across to .org and trying to reach out to more people to increase my followers and hopefully have more people reading.

After speaking to a few of you it became apparent that not only do you not really need to move to .org in order to gain engagement. You don’t have to pay all this money to have a blog that people like to read. Not only that, but it occurred to me I’d lost sight of why I started blogging in the first place.

It began in 2009 where I set up a simple diary on Tumblr to talk about my adventures. I moved to America and wanted my family to be able to read about what I was up to. They were simple posts, nothing exciting, just about what I did each day. I called it my travel journal.

It gained a few followers – people who had travelled to similar places. I blogged for around 3 people that were important to me and knowing they were reading it made me happy.

Now I write more recommendation posts and reviews and gain slightly more engagement. But I write less about myself and a daily journal as such so it is not as easy to write.

After debating over several days what to do with my blog and how to make money I came to the conclusion.. I am not that person.

I will not be told what buzz words I need to include in posts, what I need to write about to gain followers and how my posts need to look.

I write honest reviews, no sponsorship and choose the content I want to publish! I go wherever I want and say whatever I want without having to think about it.

A brief few days of following ‘fellow’ bloggers on Twitter made me realise how the blogging community is not the blogging community I want to be a part of. Constant spamming of my feed about how I can make money, how I can gain 100 followers a day. Nonsense!

I blog for me. I blog for the people I know personally. I blog for the few readers that regularly comment. I blog for the jetsetter who has just done a quick google search on a destination. I blog for the Yorkshireman who’s trying to find a dog friendly pub.

And that’s the way I like it 😉

I think I might go back to my roots and start posting some more diary like entries when I’m away. Its quick and easy to write yet great to look back on in a few years time as I remember my adventures.

So, I’d love to ask..

Why do you blog?