For several years now, I’ve been helping people learn how to blog. Keywords, meta descriptions, figuring out what to write about, how to make readers happy, driving traffic, site speed, making money, the works.

Over on the Lyrical Host blog, we put some of that into practice. There’s a fair bit of on-page search optimization, we have Pinterest pin images, we’re active on several social networks, we do some light keyword research, and we try to write blog posts our customers will find useful.

I’ve decided that this blog will continue to be very different. I mentioned to Joe I want to continue to keep it simple and stripped back: no plans for commercial promotion, no keyword research, no fancy images or strategies. He said, “So basically, you don’t want to feel like it’s work then.”

That’s it in a nutshell. I love work and I love everything about blogging, don’t get me wrong. But so many things put me off blogging here for a really long time; I wasn’t happy with the typography, I felt it had lost its way in terms of content and what I’d write about, it’s a big mess behind the scenes because of all the iterations its gone through over the years, and there are around seven hundred posts that could do with new images and a bit of freshening up.

But for now I’m ignoring 99% of that. I decided to fix the design issues that were bugging me (and probably readers), but instead of going back and making a whole bunch of changes and putting off writing anything because it wasn’t perfect, I decided that the best thing to do was to plough forward instead. You can work on a blog forever, but the most important thing is getting a post out there. Fresh content, simple writing, blogging like it used to be.

Life is pretty much just work for me at the moment, so there will likely be a lot of business and self-employed types of posts, but I’ll also be writing about my day to day life, anything big that happens. And I’m happy to take suggestions if anyone has anything in particular they’d like to see me cover.

Writing has always been a huge source of therapy for me, and having a place where I can just come and quickly jot some thoughts down and press publish is very appealing. Blogging has become a lot more complex and involved since I first started out in 2001, and I also have far less time than I did back then when I just had school to think about. My work on the Lyrical Host blog is pretty streamlined, and the workflow is pretty compact. But I really missed writing a blog where I can just say what I want without any pressure or never-ending to do lists or schedules. Here it will literally just be: pick a feature image from a bunch of pre-batched and uploaded options, and just write.