They Call Themselves "Amateur Bloggers"

To start blogging, people usually have different reasons and goals. They start with different things and keep doing it in different ways also. I already interviewed two of my high school friends who claimed themselves as ‘amateur bloggers’, so I asked them a few questions about why they used to blog and what their goals were. As ‘amateur bloggers’, I think that it is impressive just because they have the courage to use a blog as the media for sharing opinions and doing their hobbies.

Person A stated that he started to use a blog to share his personal stories like his activities and his opinion towards certain issues. He started his blog in late 2018. In his blog, he already shared some stories about his college life and some topics related to education. When I asked him about the reason why he used a blog, he explained that it was to improve his writing skills and to share his thoughts. He also said that he chose a blog because not so much people used a blog to share things, also he thought that people who read from the blog were the true readers because when writers shared their writings through other social media, the readers usually just scrolled through and did not really read the content. So, the blog readers are the true readers that he looked for to read his posts. 

I asked him about his purpose to make a blog and his answer was, “It is for personal branding, so people will know who I am, and then I will continue to make a professional blog one day.” That is what he wanted. Now, he just wanted to write better for his blog, and since he could not posts regularly because of his activities, he just wanted to focus on the writing skill, so he would post his writing which he thought it was good to be posted, but still, he wanted to have a famous blog in the future.

Person B, he used blog since 2018 and most of his blog posts were poems made by him. He used a blog as an archive for his poems. Because he liked to make poems and he used to follow some poem competitions, the competitions usually had a particular condition that the poem needed to be published on a website or blog first before the submission, and that was also the reason for him to use a blog. 

A similar thing to person A is that he wanted to make a professional blog someday. However, this person thought that his writing was not good yet, so he did not promote his blog to other social media. When I asked him what was the reason,  he said that he was afraid that his poem would be used carelessly by people who had no responsible. So that was why he chose to wait for the readers instead of promoting his blog. For his goals, the same with person A, he wanted to improve his poem writing skill for now, so that he could publish better works. He was working on some poems but had not decided whether he would post it or not.

As the “amateur bloggers”, they already made a good start, but both of them could not manage their blog regularly because of their decision to improve their skills first before they can post it to the blog. In my opinion, using a blog needs more than just “doing” it, but you need to have a strong motivation to keep improving your writing as well as your blog so that you can reach your goals. Also, which decision you make either ‘to improve your writing skill first before you do your blogging’ or ‘do both’, it depends on each individual and their capabilities since everyone has his own way in doing something.

--Ayu Triananingrum