From one multi-passionate creative to another
If you’re reading this, you probably have a blog idea, and it still hasn’t gone away. You haven’t fully talked yourself out of it, but you haven’t properly started yet, either. It keeps coming back to you, often out of nowhere.
Today, I’m hear to talk about why 2026 might be the perfect time for you to actually start, and why the reasons you’ve been putting it off are less solid than they might feel.
“Blogging is dead” is something people have been saying since, like, 2012
Every few years there’s the same announcement – blogging is dead! First video killed it, then social media, then podcasts, then short-form content, then AI… Yet here we are. I’m writing a blog right now, and you’re reading it. Blogs are still here, and, arguably, some of them are doing better than ever.
Blogging didn’t die, but it definitely did change. The era of posting every so often and building a dedicated fanbase has largely passed – but that doesn’t mean long-form writing on the internet is gone for good. If anything, the appetite for it seems to be growing recently.
People are tired. Tired of short-form overwhelming them, the endless scroll, shrinking attention spans, advertising everywhere, AI slop getting more and more harder to escape… There’s a reason countless young people nowadays are buying flip phones and making “analogue bags” in order to stay of social media as much as possible.
The platforms we spend most of our screentimes on aren’t failing, they are doing exactly what they were designed to do – keep us hooked on that endless loop of dopamine so they can make as much money off advertisers as possible. They manufacture dread and outrage so content feels impossible to not engage with. “Rage bait” was literally Oxford’s word of the year for 2025! So people are looking for something different. A new way to engage with the internet, a way more akin to the limitless exploration we were promised.
And blogging can do just that.
The rise of “digital gardening”
If you’re in the same internet circles I’m in, you might have come across the concept of a “digital garden”, maybe even from this exact YouTube video by podcaster Anna Howard. In this video, she describes the concept as a place that makes it possible to expand your thinking by finding and creating connections between the things you consume, be they books, videos, articles, or podcast episodes. The digital aspect comes with how these connections are found and stored, often in digital programs and apps such as Obsidian or Notion (my personal favourite, obviously!).
This practice is part of a shift in how we engage with the internet and the seemingly endless supply of “content” it has for us. The phrase “create more than you consume” has been widely used in creative circles online, and it’s a welcome reminder. How many of us put our creative efforts on pause for another round of doomscrolling? With digital gardening, you’re using your brain to actively engage with media, forming your own thoughts, opinions and takeaways rather than letting it all flow in one ear and out the other. And I believe this digital gardening practice relates beautifully to the art of blogging.
It’s a more honest relationship with the internet than the endless content machine most of us have been trained to think is the only option. With a blog, you don’t have to post every day, have a viral hook, use a trending sound. You can just say the things you need to say, and let them connect to the other things you’ve said, and watch your thinking develop in public over time.
You don’t need an audience before you start
One of the ideas that stops a lot of potential bloggers in their tracks is that you need to have a preexisting audience, otherwise there’s no point. You need to have social media perfected, your niche honed in on, and something really, really important to say. Only then can you show up, as only then people will actually listen to you.
Frankly? I don’t care that much about who reads, and you shouldn’t either.
I get that’s a bit ironic coming from an instructional/advice-oriented blog post. But the truth is, I’m not losing sleep or stopping myself from putting my work out there just because no, or very few, people engage with it.
Your audience will come – people are still Googling things! A post you write today can be found by someone three years from now who desperately needs that exact perspective. You don’t need to start with an audience, you just need to start with something they can read.
The point is your unique perspective
Here’s the other thing that tends to stop people before they even start – the niche question. So much blogging advice is centered around marketing, which is fair, but can feel limiting when you’re starting out. Who is your ideal reader? What is your niche? What do you want to be known for? It’s OK to not know the answer to those questions yet.
Your niche doesn’t have to be the exact thing you write about. You don’t have to limit yourself to one topic – like I said in this post, oftentimes the most powerful niches are the personal ones; centered around who you are, your views and opinions, not your topics.
When Anna Howard talks about digital gardening, one of the details she touches on is that gardens are non-homogeneous by nature. You can plant the exact same seeds as your neighbour, and still end up with your own unique arrangement of plants. The same is true of a blog! Two people can write about the exact same subject but from wildly different perspectives, different worldviews. That’s the beauty in it.
The blog that covers books and writing and creativity and learning and working from home and making things and figuring out how to live, all filtered through one voice, is a more interesting read than one that stays safely within the lines of a prescribed niche.
Writing in public helps you find your voice
If you’re anything like me, you used to love putting words together, writing stories, telling them to whoever would listen.
Until somewhere along the line, that part of you fell out of practice. Maybe life got in the way, maybe your dreams of moving to Paris to write in cafes just felt less and less realistic as years went on. Maybe you’ve even stopped journaling, because you just can’t find the time or space to put your thoughts to paper. That was me, too, up until recently.
What started as a vague idea has brought back my passion for writing in a huge way. I no longer feel detached from my thoughts. I look at this blog and I think, wow, I did that! Even in articles or posts where I’m not talking about anything deeper than Notion templates and Etsy. They still helped me get used to showing up, to thinking aloud, to writing in public.
This is true even if no one actually reads your blog, by the way. Just putting the work in does wonders.
A blog is one of the few things on the internet that’s actually yours
You might be one of the countless people who’ve joined Substack in the last year or so, a platform less like modern social media (although there is still an algorithmic structure to it, especially if you spend a lot of time on the “notes” feed) and more akin to something like early Tumblr, where long-form text posts are not only welcome but encouraged, and everything feels a little slower. You might want to start your blog on Substack – after all, it’s a great way to get your words out there to an existing audience – but a very important thing to remember about a self-hosted blog, (i.e, one powered by WordPress, hosted by a service like BlueHost or Hostinger) is that it’s actually, fully, completely yours.
There’s no algorithm changes hiding your posts from your followers, no “shadowbanning”, no government officials deciding to close down an entire social media platform one random day only to reverse their decision weeks later; most, if not all, of the main problems associated with putting your work out there on social media are nonexistent when you have your own blog. You get personalization unmatched by any profile picture, you get to structure your posts however you want, there’s no word limits, no self-censorship to appease the algorithm. A blog is your own space – your own digital garden, in a way!
The internet is changing at a pace most of us can’t even conceptualize. Your blog doesn’t have to move as fast.
This is the year you actually do it
You don’t need a perfect setup, you don’t need to know how your blog is going to perform years down the line, you don’t need to have a perfectly planned posting strategy; all you need is a name, a website, and the power to write. Everything else can be figured out as you go along.
The writers that inspire you, the bloggers and Substackers and video essayists, didn’t start out perfectly polished and knowing exactly what to say. They started off where you are now – with an idea and the courage to start.
The blog that changed someone’s life likely doesn’t exist yet. You could be the one to write it. 🌸
If you’re ready to start your blog and want a place to plan your content, track your posts, and build your blogging business with intention rather than chaos, the Blogging Business HQ Notion template was built exactly for this. Come take a look →
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