Your Blog Keeps Changing…a Philosophical Reflection

If you regularly click on my blog links, you’ll notice it keeps looking different. Sorry about that. Since I don’t have the energy or money to renovate my house, I’m playing with my blog instead. Here’s the backstory:

I had the privilege last fall of teaching a Financial Peace University class with my brother and his wife as students. As a result of paying off their student loan debt and being ridiculously excited for the future, they started listening to a podcast called ChooseFI – the FI stands for Financial Independence. Bro sent me their way, and I listened to an awesome podcast about building a blog into a business. I was inspired! I briefly envisioned quitting teaching when my incredibly viral popular blog spawned me thousands in monthly affiliate and advertising revenue! I’d land a book deal. They literally said the line, “I can’t think of anyone who has been blogging regularly for six years or so  NOT finding some success.” Well hey, I’ve been blogging for six years. Me! Me! Me!

Long story short, I’m not quitting my day job. Let’s be honest, if I quit teaching, then I’d have nothing to blog about!  But listening to Brad and Jeff on this podcast talk about how to solve problems and engage communities with a blog inspired me to revisit the quality of my own site.

I played with a new theme a few weeks ago after my post on our school’s walk out/memorial walk went locally viral. I wanted to make sure my blog was the best it could be with new eyes on it. But after using it a bit I wasn’t thrilled with the interface.

My new “business” venture…sort of.

I’ll be honest – even though I’ve been writing for the better part of six years, I still don’t know that much about blogging. I don’t know what SEO is. I haven’t bought the domain name. I read a bit about affiliate links, but haven’t been brave enough to sign up for a program. I know some of you actually receive my blog via email, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where I can access that email list. Maybe I’ll play with Google AdSense just to see how it works, or affiliate links, but for now I settled for creating a store on Teachers Pay Teachers, which is sort of an Etsy store for curriculum design. But that’s another post.

Basically, I have never quite been sure what my blog is. Is it a journal I share with strangers? Is it a way to keep my mom up to date with my life? Is it a place to learn about teaching? Is it for sharing my kids’ lives when I sometime in the future decide to give up Facebook?

I still don’t know quite what I’m doing. But after seeing my AP juniors make really cool blogs on Weebly, I’ve been playing with my own blog over at Blogger. It’s not as pretty or professional-looking as Weebly, but with six years of posts the idea of migrating seems way too big with six weeks left in the school year. So if you’re a regularly reader and any changes annoy you, please let me know! I’m not entirely certain who my audience is anymore, so feel free to introduce yourself if you’re not, you know, my mom or my husband.