What to write?

Thoughts on writing a personal blog

A year ago, I started the wonderful adventure of writing a blog. After publishing my second book, “A Woman on Fire,” I found it necessary to have a website where readers could communicate with me. Being a personal blog, I thought, I had the freedom to write about the topics that interested me most and share my reflections with other people, especially about health and well-being topics.  

Like any project that is started, at the beginning I was overcome by uncertainty. First of all, I didn't know how to design a website and I wasn't sure if my articles were going to be written in Spanish or English. What I was clear about was that I wanted to write, because for me writing is a form of therapy. In fact, my first article was on therapeutic writing, and I published it in English. 

When sharing the article, many of my Spanish-speaking friends let me know that they preferred to read in Spanish. At university I learned that when it comes to the media, the audience, or in this case the readers, have the last word. So, I immediately made the decision to write my articles in both languages. 

 

Designing a website can be seen as a challenge, especially if you lack technical knowledge, as it was in my case. Fortunately, today one can find tutorials on YouTube, in several languages, that show you in detail the complete process to carry out a task of any kind.

To design the Isabel’s-Library page, I followed step-by-step instructions from Tony Teaches Tech and Abraham on how to create a free website on Blogger. Although I explored other platforms, Blogger allowed me to design the page and see my progress immediately. To my surprise, creating the website took me less than three hours and the personal satisfaction I experienced was enormous. To be honest, I never imagined I could design it myself!

While researching how to design the page, I came across a video by Dr Ali Abdaal that changed my perception about blogging. In the video he explains his experience as a blogger and suggests that everyone should have a website to share knowledge.

Publising articles enrich your personal and your professional life. If the person is young, having a blog to comment on topics of interest or related to the profession is a way to let future employers know about their experience and skills. Additionally, it can open the doors to being contacted by different organizations to deliver conference or for speaking engagements.

   

Once the topic has been chosen, to write each article I have to search several sources and select the information that best fits the title I have chosen. This activity is quite enriching because I expand my knowledge about the topic and then, when writing the article, I review the content and this allows me to learn more. So the first person who benefits from what I write is me.

In one year, my blog has been visited by more than 100,000 people from more than 60 countries. Most of my readers are in the United Kingdom, Colombia, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Spain. I also have readers in Germany, Puerto Rico, France, Mexico and Pakistan to name a few of the countries where people have been interested in what I write.

In addition to sharing my ideas, the blog has been important to establish links with people from other countries. A Colombian girl contacted me to share details about my experience of writing a book, since she also wanted to write one to tell her story of fighting cancer. So the blog has allowed me to explore the topic of health and also speak openly about difficult topics to address such as cancer.

To conclude, writing a personal blog has definitely enriched my life. The blog has allowed me to deepen my knowledge about the topics I write about. I have also been able to learn about computing, website design and editing, among other things. However, what I have enjoyed most is sharing my ideas with people from different cultures.

Thank you very much to all my readers for visiting my blog regularly. I hope you find my monthly articles useful and invite you to suggest topics for my next articles.