Seasonal Focus – successful blog writing through the seasons

I sit here, this morning and I have lots of thoughts of success and passions running through my head.  There are 11 years worth of consistent blog posts on this blog address.  I have been posting here for most of my adult-ish life.  I have posts from when my, now teenage, children were babies! 

{October 2004 – a year after I started this blog}

{June 2015}

So how do I turn this blog into something successful for my life?  Because it is a wealth of memories and tutorials and little tidbits of things that I want to share.  In my heart of hearts, I am a teacher.  It is who I am.  I teach about everything.  I used to post tutorials about things I had just done once before, because teaching is part of how I learn. 

What I do not want to do is sit at my computer until my eyeballs bleed.  I am not interested in spending hours here, nor do I want to ignore my children  to get my blogging done (which used to be done more than I wanted to admit).  There have been huge breaks in my consistent blogging in the past couple years because I found myself obsessed with getting the memories down on the blog instead of being IN THEM with my children.  So now I take pictures in the moment, and I blog later. And ‘later’ has more recently turned into ‘never’. 

{Yes.  Those are carrots in my purse.  My kids are hilarious.} 

So how can I be successful and still be present and accounted for in my actual life?  The life off the page?  The one I am quickly learning goes by so very fast with fleeting years that stomp on me when I look at how much of my time I have dedicated to tasks that DON’T MATTER?

I have read, over and over, successful blogs where writers just up and quit one day because they are burnt out and realized that they were not spending time with their children as much as grasping at every good moment and then running to the computer to make sure it was documented on the blog.  I do not want to do that.  So I have been studying long term bloggers to see what they do.  Here are a few things I have learned:

They repost.  They will take a recipe, or craft, or whatever, and they will repost it in an appropriate season so that they have ‘new’ material on the blog but only took 15 minutes to write up.

They roundup.  They will gather 5 or 6 posts that are relevant to a season of blogging and have that post be their newest material.

They post pictures and very little words.  A picture says a thousand words…. but only takes a moment to take a picture and to write a thousand words would take SO MANY MORE MOMENTS.  So they are smart, and take pictures.  They write a paragraph and then post that paragraph with 7 pictures. 

When they have time, they do new posts, new recipes, new tutorials…  but those other posts are what is usually on the first page of their blogs.  I am not sure if that is the best way to go or if it is the best way to save your sanity.  But at some point, the blog has to work for you and your family as much as you are working for the blog.  I don’t have the following I did 4 years ago before the magnitude of this life hit me and I took so many breaks from recording every craft we ever did, and I am not sure I will get that type of following back, now that I am on page 3 of the Google search.  But I am going to try to buff and polish this blog and get her running again.  Because I did enjoy it and I do miss it.  It’s a part of me I am not willing to lose, but ‘collecting the moments’ has to come after ‘living the moments’ in my life and I am getting ready to make that happen.