The Benefits of Blogging

A few times a year, I offer a workshop on Blogging to the veterans of the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP).  One of the threads in my workshops is about how blogging can be a cool hobby, but it can also lead to other great things if you want to do.  Some of the participants want to use blogging to build brands.  Yesterday, one lady indicated wanting to use it to promote her customized T-shirt business.  A gentleman wished to use it to build his brand as a woodworker and entrepreneurship coach.  Another wanted to do a blog on parenting to speak to parents, mostly Moms.
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I begin the workshop by establishing my own ethos as a blogger; I briefly discuss how this blog has led to a brand as a “singlehood activist writer” or something to that effect, but for the most part, I have my “writing hat” on as opposed to the singlehood one.  But afterwards, I thought about how much of an impact blogging has had on my brand.  In fact, it started there.

Before I became introduced to Bella DePaulo, I was always trying to find “the one.”  But it never seemed to work out; in hindsight, my heart was never in those relationships/situationships/dating situations/whatever.  I was just trying to play the game to fit in.  Some of it was caused by those microaggressions (“When are you getting married/settling down/whatever”).  After going down the rabbit hole of Bella’s work, I did what any logophile does: I wrote about it in rants, observations, and musings.

Coincidentally, this was the time Community of Single People (CoSP) formed.  I was looking for an audience to validate my anger, and I got it.  As I kept writing, my tone became more refined.  About four years after I started blogging, the “publications” came all at once: an article in Revista Feminismos analyzing the singlist tropes in Crossing Delancey and Trainwreck; an activist piece for Spark: a 4C4 Equality Journal; and finally, How to be a Happy Bachelor.  I also talk about writing as a social tool; my blogging led to a connection with Ketaki Chowkhani, a scholar from Manipal, India; we worked on Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies, a collection of essays from scholars in the titular field.  I consider some of those scholars to be friends.

And all of those things have led to Op-Eds, appearances on podcasts, an interview on a TV news show, and, of course, tenure.  I was awarded the title of full professor this past summer; this title is a rarity in higher education now.  I’m on the Board of Singles Equality, an organization that aims to raise awareness of all things singlehood advocacy-related.  And I realize the previous paragraphs are an infodump of my accomplishments, but the point is that blogging was the road I took to get to where I’m at.  And I encourage students in these workshops to blog regularly and to be open to where their writing might take them.

When I started blogging, I was just looking for an outlet.  I never thought it would be a career or a brand.  But here we are.  So, if you’re a writer, keep writing.