You can’t blag a blog.

There, I said it; you can’t blag a blog.

A bold statement, and (as with so many sweeping generalisations) almost certainly incorrect, but nevertheless, for the purposes of this rather personal diatribe, I maintain that you can’t blag a personal blog.

According to my mild and admittedly slightly random trolling of the internet, there seem to be 5 main categories of blogs.

• Business Blogs.
• Affiliate Blogs.
• Niche Blogs.
• News Blogs.
• Personal Blogs.

Pick your blog battles

To be clear, I’m not talking about the first four categories; In today’s world, corporate blogging is a core element in the wider pantheon of social media promotion. Increasingly, there is a demand for regular, informed contributions from businesses and individuals, and it helps to ensure their presence is kept front and centre in the mind’s eye of clients and customers.

At NMPR, we’re fortunate to have a great team of authoritative experts who know their stuff and are so talented that they can produce an enviable stream of essential, research-driven, fact-led, informative, and considered corporate blogging content at the drop of a schedulers’ hat.

Truly, these types of blog are genuinely useful and, whilst hard to write unless you are as skilled as our team, and requiring a lot of hard yards, great contributions can be delivered. And this is as it should be.

I get that. It’s good to blog.

However, it’s when you come to write a personal blog, that the difficulty arises…

“Come on; be spontaneous…NOW!”

By definition, a personal blog needs to be personal. And heartfelt. And passionate. And REAL. And unless I feel all these things about a subject, I find it almost impossible to write it.

So, when the office blogging schedule plops into my inbox, with a notification that it’s my turn to deliver an unprompted personal blog, my brain sighs gently, packs a large suitcase of belongings, double locks all the doors, and takes a long uncontactable holiday. It’s at this point that someone should gently ease the mouse from my febrile grasp…

Occasionally, the Blogging Gods are kind, and the call to write a personal blog perfectly aligns with the moment that you have a burning desire to do so. This happened most recently for me when I visited the extraordinary Museum of Making in Derby.

I am sometimes accused of being prone to a bit of exaggeration and hyperbole (guilty on both counts), but on this occasion, I can honestly relate that, within 30 minutes of sitting back at my desk, I had written my personal blog about the utterly inspiring experience.

One take, one version, no revisions, no angst-ridden scrabbling about for synonyms, adapted sentence structures and word count. BOOM! It was written and submitted for peer review.

So, my advice? Write a personal blog when you FEEL it, not when the schedule tells you it’s time.

Store it. Don’t change it much (if at all).

And wait.

Author’s addendum – I am not unaware (like you, hopefully) of the whimsical irony of this blog. Here’s me bemoaning the soul wrenching difficulty of coming up with subject matter for a personal blog, and it’s become one in itself. Who’d have thought?