About

Garrett has blogged about San Antonio food and culture on SA Flavor since 2009 and believes the best cheese enchiladas in town are found at Oscar’s Taco House. He currently works at Rackspace as a social media marketer and has held roles as an operations analyst, cloud project manager and content marketer. You can read his blog about digital marketing at MarketingBytes.io.

Topic: Has your blog become a vampire?

Remember what it was like when you first set up your blog? You were full of piss and vinegar and incredibly excited. It may have sustained you during a rocky time at work or in your personal life. It was a life force that energized you. After all, people would be reading what you had to say.

Then it happened. Your blog moved from being a life force to a life suck, taking away all the joy that you originally had. Updating it became a chore; you exhaled an audible groan every time you opened up wp-admin. Your blog turned into a vampire (and not of the Twilight variety).

This talk is geared around the four types of blog vampires I’ve encountered and strategies to help make personal blogging fun again. Regardless of where you are on your blogging journey, vampires abound, including:

The No One Is Reading My Blog Vampire—this is where a blogger becomes so despondent after realizing that no one, not even their friends and family, are reading their blog

• The Keeping Up with the Jones’s Vampire—this is where a blogger starts comparing themselves to others and has a feeling of inadequacy/jealousy
• Getting Caught Up in the Fame of (Minor) Celebrity—this is where the blogger gets an inkling of fame and PR people reach out along with the endless invites; but it’s to things they may not care about
• The Administrative Vampire—this is where the blogger gets mired down in all the SEO/tagging/socialing/posting minutiae and hates life

All these vampires make you want to just give up. But that flicker of light from the life force still draws you in. You feel confused on what to do and mostly trapped—I mean, isn’t this supposed to be fun? Having personally experienced all of these types of blog vampires, I’ll walk through strategies to vanquish them so you can enjoy the joys of blogging once again.