Five Reasons Why You Should Be Blogging Consistently Even During a Pandemic

The Blogchatter Half-Marathon has ten commandments, of which the second is

Thou Shalt Be Consistent

This past year and a half have been surreal. I remember thinking in 2019: Wow! Look at the world! We jet off wherever and whenever. We’re fly away on vacations to Dubai, Singapore and Bangkok, everyone i know has a car or at least a two-wheeler, kids of eight and nine walk around with smart phones. Even the most ordinary person can dream big and know he/she will make it happen! India has made it I think to myself!

And then 2020 happened…

I cannot lie, the year started off well enough with New Years’ celebrations and visits with friends. I vaguely registered reading in the newspaper at the end of December that there was a new virus discovered in China before i jetted off to bring in the New Year in ishstylu!

March! Ah, March! You brought it with you; lockdowns, flight bans, business shut downs… Cozily you settled in at home – having stocked up for three months with everything you think you may need, including frozen snacks, because, well, you never know right?! You actually estimate a month of this and it’ll all be over!

Blogging takes a back seat as you became MasterChef, creating everything and anything you can in the kitchen. Cakes, chocolate chip cookies, lasagna, tacos and exotic food from  YouTube pals took over. Oh yeah baby! You are consistent in the initial few months!

After many plate-banging’s and light-holdings and singing to an empty street (you live away from civilization) your cooking skills take a painful dive.

Yawn! What’s for breakfast Hun? Err…bread dear.

Dinner? Let me make you a dosai with the sambar left over from…hmm…anyway here’s the sambar, maybe you could make the dosai yourself?

Yup MasterChef takes a toss, along with blogging.

Thou shalt be consistent – yeah sure mate.

Okays, now let’s see, it’s now June…and guess what? You’re gonna take all those hundreds of black & white photos and those boxes of colour photos (Yup, you have those! Film, camera, negatives, prints and nothing on digital yet!). You are going to scan everything and up load them to the cloud and then all of you and your cousins can see every one of them!

Yeshhh! Now this is what you need to do.

Finding free apps to scan photos takes a whole three days. You try each one and then settle on The One. Okay, let’s start with the children’s baby photos… There are five or six different bunches of photos of at least a hundred in each. Hmm… maybe you should put them in chronological order first. Oh wait! Look how cute baby J looks in this photo… aww! Baby P is dressed up as Krishna! And another day goes in sorting, smiling, reminiscing about those days.

Ho hum, time to start scanning… here we go, scanning is happening fast, you’re through with four or five boxes on day 1. And so, it goes on for a week or two. A month. Whew! Now time for mom’s black & whites and dad’s and your own childhood photos…

Oh, Lockdown Lifted, Really?

Okayyy then, let’s get out of the house, it seems like years. Days go by in shopping, walking (fresh air and all that!) Scanning takes a backseat. You’ll do it later. Months go by but of course they’re stilling lying around waiting! Consistency is clearly not your name!

July comes and goes, Diwali, and then Christmas again, New Year’s… Time has been flying away despite work-from-home and some cautious travel. Travel bans, flight bubbles are here and there and your blog sits around waiting.

It’s now 2021

You didn’t touch your blog. After all, you aren’t traveling, so what do you write about? It dawns on you that you could have Improvised! You could have thought up a backup, there are so many topics of interest. You can just keep a record of all the social media posts about the pandemic. There are so many stories in posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Open your eyes and look! You can earn some passive income if you are consistent.

Finally, you realize this pandemic isn’t over yet. A second wave is on the horizon and you have wasted a lot of time. Prodded by your friend Sona, you start to review a book. Months have flown by, nothing has changed, except for a brief period of a few months. Thou shalt be consistent and all that; time to get going again.

You realize your fans are gone; you don’t have an audience anymore. Start all over again.

You decide that the Blogchatter Half Marathon may help you kick start your blog again and you grab the chance. Fingers crossed that you will stick to blogging from now on…

Why is Consistency so Important? Or Five Reasons to Consistently Blog During a Pandemic.

You have a captive audience and when you don’t deliver a blog post, they move on and when you do write, there’s no one to read it.

The more you write, the more long-tail key words you have. This means that there are more chances of Google picking up your key words for a search.

You share your knowledge and prove your authority in a chosen topic.

The more content you generate on a regular basis, the more a search engine will note it, and bring up your blog when a suitable search is available. This means search engines love fresh content.

And don’t even start on the money you can make when you monetize your blog. The more people visit, the more money you can make.

Conclusion

Don’t make the mistake this writer did. Continue to slog on your blog come hell or high water! Keep at it. Find a topic that not only interests your audience but something you like to write about. Keep a backup plan for when your content is no longer relevant or possible to write about. Get the world to see your blog by making use of social media to bring your audience in. You should be blogging consistently even during a pandemic.

So, let’s see now, may be time to organize the book collection at home, you know, catalogue the books, make a system…

Your clothes wardrobe could do with a makeover…

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.