A few years ago, with a twinkle in my eye and a workbook of dreams, I started my blog. You see, I loved talking with other marketers about marketing, but inside B2B organizations, I just didn’t often get to discuss or test ideas the way I was excited to do.

I got started

I wrote my first blog post and posted it to some select social media. A handful of connections commented, it was so exciting. Then I published the second blog, oops a typo, but people still responded. Thrilling!

Then the algorithm changed and I needed to post on certain days and times. Those days and times conflicted with school drop-off and work. So I started scheduling. Then I needed different intro posts, closings, tags, and keywords. So I needed to reallocate some of my writing time to that. Then the algorithms changed again, comments and reach decreased. I needed to warm up the algorithm before posting my blogs at a certain day and time that also coincided with home and work. I had a grid of structured time during the week of things I had to do so that someone would see my writing. I had a notebook of what my writing needed to be to gain favor.

That’s a long paragraph of things I had to do. None of it was writing.

I started struggling to find inspiration, I became unfaithful, moving from posting weekly, to every fortnight, then realizing I hadn’t written in a month.

The crash

With the enthusiasm of an elementary-school-age trick-or-treater, I remembered my tickler file. Ideas I’d stored away that I could pull from, but when I read them, it was like yelling trick or treat and receiving dental floss. What was there was useful but not likely to get my creative juices flowing the way it would if I’d received a full-size Snickers bar. Eight possible topics of bland ideas. The no-name candy, if you will.

I tried to power through and wondered why I was spending more time playing the games on LinkedIn than posting. Then it hit me: this thing that lit me up to talk about had become work. And not work in a way that I didn’t want to spend time on or that was hard, but work in the way that there were so many other things I needed to do to do everything “right” that it had become cumbersome. The joy of learning and sharing had been replaced with this requirement to perform.

So, channeling all my Gen X powers of dissent, I’m deciding to stop. I am just going to write and share. It’s not going to be at a certain time or day, not priming any algorithm or making sure I engage beforehand, it’s not going to be a certain length or structure. (It will still hopefully be typo-free because I just can’t not have the AI check, even if the AI usage police come for me, but that’s another post.)

My hope in sharing this is that someone else may read this who feels the Siren call of algorithmic performance, and it inspires them to shove wax in their ears and sail on by with me.