Reflections on Blogging

Tips, Tricks, and Thoughts on this Activity

As the year wraps up, everyone wants to reflect on their achievements, failures, and hobbies over the past 365 days. In that spirit, I wanted to share some general reflections on blogging. I’ve been blogging on and off for almost seven years now. I started on Wordpress with a friend during my freshman year at Georgetown, and now I’m here on Substack while (hopefully) wrapping up my PhD at Oxford. The more things change, the more they stay the same… In all honesty, this is not really a reflection on this past year of blogging as much as it is a series of semi-connected thoughts on blogging as an activity. With that said, hopefully this post will be of some value to you either as a roadmap for your own blogging endeavors or just as a peek into my vision of blogging as an activity. So, without further ado, let’s get into it!

1. Blogging is immensely personal - If you have any aspirations to write a serious blog, you need to find a steady stream of inspiration. There is no editor to vet your ideas, no publisher holding your feet to the fire, and, at least in my case, no pecuniary returns incentivizing you to push out new pieces. Consequently, successful blogging demands that you possess a strong motivation and passion for writing. I think this is really important to appreciate. Many people start a blog because they have one or two interesting ideas that they want to develop, but that is not sufficient to sustain a blog, and so their output inevitably falls and their readership collapses. A better approach is to have a broad concept of your blog’s purpose. Is it a diary, a series of research notes, or simply a compendium of book reviews? There is no right answer, but there must be an answer if you are to be successful. For me, blogging is a tool both to educate myself and my readers. Since I teach international security, I use blog posts as a way to write up small literature reviews on topics I’m unfamiliar with or with which I’m a bit rusty, which helps me clarify connections between readings and generate a written product I can share with students preparing for examinations. Because many of my readers work in defense or academia, I also try to write posts that introduce them to each other’s field. Thus, I have some posts on nuclear modelling equations for political scientists used to more abstract discussions of military power, and I have other posts that try to synthesize broader findings in the conflict literature for military analysts more accustomed to bean counting and lacking the time to read international relations journals. Obviously this will be of little interest to many readers, but it’s hopefully broad and quirky enough to capture a meaningful chunk of the demographic with whom I enjoy engaging.

2. Consistency is key - It is crucial to post regularly. Now to be clear, this hardly means posting every day or even every week! Posting too frequently can kill readership, especially on subscription-based platforms like Substack, because readers get burned out and simply stop opening your emails. Moreover, unless you are one of the most creative people on the planet, you simply do not possess enough interesting ideas to consistently put out fascinating takes every day. But successful bloggers need to maintain a roughly consistent schedule. This is partly because consistency is a costly signal of commitment, which is crucial at a time when literally anyone can start a blog. If I’m going to subscribe to someone’s writings (and they aren’t a close friend), I want to be sure there will be good returns on my decision. If the writer can’t be bothered to post even once a month, I can’t be bothered to follow them. The other reason that consistency is crucial is simply that, as a writer, it’s very difficult to know ex ante which posts will prove successful. Some of my favorite and most time-intensive posts get only several tens of views, while other posts that I’ve just slapped together with minimal thought receive thousands. There’s seemingly no rhyme or reason to these patterns, but because the few big readership pieces are what drive subscriptions and views, it is sometimes worth it to simply brute force the process and just hope that you’ll generate enough hit pieces by accident to raise your profile.

3. Blogging is great for academics - I know this used to be a hot take (and probably still is in some corners) because blogging takes away from time spent on “real” research. But I find this view completely misguided. For one, if we’re being honest, almost nobody reads our “real” academic research except for the handful of specialists in our sub-discipline. But many intelligent people are willing to read a blog that concisely and accessibly summarizes interesting work that is otherwise tucked behind arcane methods, dense jargon, and paywalled journals. This is especially true given that blogging allows one to escape the stultifying peer-review and editorial process and actually write in artful, readable prose while engaging with big ideas. This makes the blog format perfect for more casual and speculative writing while also creating an ideal forum for presenting cool findings and tidbits left on the cutting room floor of bigger research projects. Blogging is further useful for academics insofar as it serves as a public record of one’s ability to write for a wider audience, which, given the horrendously bad academic job market, should not be underappreciated.

4. You have no editor - This is both liberating and terrifying. On the one hand, you can say what you want, how you want, without anyone second guessing you. On the other hand, this fact significantly increases the burden on you for fact-checking and editing. Relatedly, and quite unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to completely eliminate typos (much to my embarrassment and chagrin). Indeed, the best way to find them is to hit publish! Hopefully readers are understanding about this, but I think the key takeaway is that blogging, almost paradoxically given its fairly casual format, requires more intensive upfront effort than many other forms of publishing. This is because you must maintain at least some semblance of professionalism, but you must do it without any real institutional support. The marginal returns for doing that one last proof-read are thus actually quite high.

5. Writing blogs leads to reading blogs - An underappreciated phenomenon of blogging is that it is an inherently social process. Because blogging is so accessible, and because so many bloggers converge on the same few platforms, it is trivially easy to find yourself subscribed to a huge range of thoughtful writers discussing a variety of topics. I think this is wonderful both for reasons of intellectual edification and for reasons of equity. In terms of the former, subscribing to a range of fascinating thinkers’ blogs has introduced me to cross-disciplinary ideas and concepts that I otherwise would have been very unlikely to stumble across. There’s so much I don’t know, and being exposed to new concepts and frameworks of thinking about the world helps keep me passionate about learning even when I’m burned out on my dissertation or struggling to read that next book from Cornell Press’s security studies series (if you know, you know). In terms of the latter, blogging is wonderful in that it gives a voice to scholars from less prestigious universities or from parts of the world that are difficult to travel from and thus closed off to conventional avenues of interaction such as academic conferences. No doubt there are other online platforms that fulfill this role—for example, Twitter—but the longer form aspect of blogging makes it a very valuable complement to the more short, punchy writing of Twitter.

6. Thank you! - I should of course conclude by saying thank you to everyone reading this. I get a lot of value out of writing these blogs, but much of the value derives from the knowledge that there are people out there giving me a portion of their time to read what I have to say. I hope that I can continue to put out content worthy of your time and attention, and I look forward to carrying this blog forward into 2023. As usual, please continue sharing my blog with friends and colleagues if you think they’d enjoy it (I’m always on the hunt for that next subscriber!), and have a very happy New Year!