Why I almost quit blogging

Norman Price is clearly Fireman Sam's son, he obviously had a one night stand round the back of the fire station with Dilys, and who does Penny think she's kidding? She's clearly hot for Sam's sister in law.

We all know this is true! If you're a parent anyway.

This is one of the reasons I got into blogging, so I could discuss true, hard-hitting topics with lots of like minded people who will agree with me.

However this weekend I almost packed it all in. Here's why...

I got into blogging in July after 7 months of wanting to do it but not quite being arsed. I had done a bit of research on things and finally wrote my first post. My aim with blogging was to just write whatever topic I felt I could write more than 140 characters on.

Recently I have been struggling for inspiration on my posts and haven't thought that a lot of them were that good. In the hope of getting my blogging mojo back, I thought I would try the 30-day blogging challenge. A series of questions each day for 30 days and you have to create a post for each question. Brilliant! That will get me some content out there, get people to know me a little more and also get me hopefully a minimum of 3000 page views. Which I am on track for currently (only on day 14).

This weekend I sat and thought about my blog and realised I was unhappy with it, my main focus has been to see how many page views I can get. I was also really disappointed that I only have 2 subscribers and 32 followers on Bloglovin. Nothing seemed to be moving that much, apart from the page views. But that wasn't the reason I got into blogging. I am extremely grateful to everyone that reads my posts but I never set out to aim for a specific number of views etc. I just wanted to write to improve my writing skills and also use it as a little escape.

Then I started to read a few posts on Blogfest and how a lot of men who were there felt that some people were blatantly just abusing male bloggers and dismissing them. I saw a lot of female bloggers sticking up for the men on this and saying how uncomfortable it was at times. Then there were a few females commenting that women have been mistreated in the workplace etc for years. WTF?! What has this got to do with blogging? I'm all up for people having their own opinions but this seemed ridiculous, I never realised that blogging would become so political. At the end of the day, most people blog because they like to write or want to improve their writing skills. Plenty of people blog because there awesome at it and can make money off it. Well done to anyone who does that!

Reading a lot of these Tweets/FB posts made me question whether I wanted to blog anymore. I had fallen out of love with blogging. 

After turning the laptop off and coming away from facebook and Twitter, I thought about why I had started my blog in the first place. I have a personality where I want to be the best at everything I do, whether that be, being the best store manager at work, having the best store, being the best father etc. I am by no means the best at any of these and am not naive enough or big headed enough to think I am. But that passion to be the best is what drives me on to always think about what I can do to be better. My thoughts started with my blog name, Dick the powerful ruler. When I first started blogging I wanted a name that was different and slightly amusing. Now that I have been blogging for a few months and haven't sacked it off after two days, I thought that my blog name really needs to give people more of an idea as to what it is I actually blog about.

After a poll on Twitter and a couple of conversations on FB I decided that I would change my name to "One Hull of a Dad". I am a Dad and I'm from Hull. That will give people more of an idea about me and it wouldn't make me sound as though I write ruler porn like my old name did. This new name also doesn't restrict me to writing any specific type of posts throughout my blog.

I still sat and thought about the whole Blogfestgate and that some people turned it into a political scene. I then realised that I don't really give a shit. Those people can have their political ideas, but for me its just blogging. People will either like my stuff or won't, if anyone doesn't like my posts because I am a man who blogs well that's their loss, you'll be missing out on some comedy gold. As soon as I find some myself. 

I changed my domain name and all of my social media accounts to my new blog name and began promoting the new name. Lots of people had commented and said they really liked this new name and that they wouldn't have dared to click on my old name for fearing of seeing something weird. I'm really glad I changed it now and that I also asked people about it on Twitter and FB, as I usually just read the threads and don't participate in them. I am not going to get hung up on the number of subscribers or page views etc I am just going to write for me and be grateful that anyone reads it at all. Thanks to everyone who liked the new name and who also commented with some advice!

I have got my blogging mojo back!

Look out for more posts soon

Richie "One Hull Of A Dad"

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