How Blogging Can Change Your Life

How Blogging Shaped My Writing Journey and Opened Doors to Unexpected Opportunities

May 19, 2024

It’s only fitting that my first official post on Substack touches on the importance of blogging for writers and creatives. After all, my journey is filled with memorable moments that involve my various blogs over the years. But I first want to say that I never got into blogging with the intention of it leading to bigger opportunities. My goal was, and still is, to share my personal experiences with others in hopes of inspiring, educating, or transforming them in some way. To be honest, I think when you approach blogging with that mindset, it takes the pressure off feeling like you have to sacrifice substance for clicks, appeal to everybody, achieve big numbers, or gain extensive visibility.

I find that blogging as a writer and creative works best when you can simply be authentic to who you truly are.

My Journey Into Blogging

I started my first blog in 2009 as a sophomore in college. It was a cheeky little space dedicated to musings on entertainment, love, relationships, and more. I called it Handcuffs ‘n Heels (don’t ask, lol), and even enlisted a fellow classmate to help with some of the design elements, as I was a novice in web design at the time.

The next year, I started a travel blog to document my journey while studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain. It gave my family and friends a way to keep up with me since technology at the time didn’t make checking in with loved ones as easy as a FaceTime call. Again, I had no intention of either blog being anything more than a personal outlet. A space where I could document thoughts and passions without limitations. Yet, even at 20, I knew that a blog could also be a portfolio showcasing your greatest work.

After returning from my travels that year, I attempted to create an app with a company that specialized in building location-based travel guides. I used my travel blog to pitch an idea for an app about things to do and places to go and eat in Barcelona, which was met with great enthusiasm. I spent months gathering information and referencing my blog to help create content and repurposing it into digestible content. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of work the app would require, and the challenge of building one about a country I no longer lived in proved too great. The app never came to fruition, but from that experience, I learned just how valuable documenting the world around you could be. It can serve as a snapshot in time, a documented trail of who you were and what mattered to you at different points in your life.

How Blogging Leveled Up My Career

In 2011, I discovered how blogging could become the catalyst for a fulfilling career. That year, I snagged an internship at a big sportswear company in Portland, Oregon. Using my small but growing writing portfolio separated me from thousands of other applicants and got me the job in the Global Marketing department. While it wasn’t my role, I found myself writing for the company’s sportswear blog, which landed me my first freelance writing gig at the age of 21 before I even graduated from college. Although I wasn’t blogging for myself, this taught me yet another lesson on just how far writing could take you. It also was my first taste of understanding how important blogging and writing were for companies and brands. Anyone could throw together some words and put them on a page, but it took a true writer to strategize and create content that people actually wanted to read.

This revelation changed the way I thought about writing. No longer was I constrained to pursue a path of journalism (although I would later accomplish the goal of being an online magazine editor). I now saw possibilities beyond profiles and interviews and into actual corporate roles.

How Blogging Increased My Visibility

For a few years after graduating college, I stepped away from blogging. Adapting to the real world became my focus as I entered adulthood, and writing for personal reasons took a backseat. But around 2015, while sitting in the living room of my first roommate-less apartment, a desire swelled up in me that I couldn’t ignore. I was going through a lot mentally and emotionally during that time. Looking back now, I view that period as transformative. Despite being a private person, I wanted to share some of those personal growth moments with the world. Once again, I returned to the foundation of the very thing I loved—blogging. At this point, I was a self-professed pro at coming up with an idea, branding it, setting up the website, and building out content ideas.

For the next few years, I shared some of my deeper self-reflections and provocative musings on my blog Write On Kiah. It was also during a time when blogging was at a high—regular, everyday people were getting blog awards, writing books from their content, building large brands and audiences, and getting once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to work with big brands to create authentic content.

While I wasn’t initially a recipient of those awards and brand partnerships, I found that I was getting visibility in other ways. People were finding and connecting with my content and sharing it with their friends and loved ones. My posts sparked conversations on podcasts with people in the entertainment and media industry that I looked up to.

#RelationshipGoals was a podcast hosted by entertainment and music journalists Danyel Smith (fellow Substacker) and Elliott Wilson where they shared musings on the latest in pop culture and entertainment. My blog post was mentioned in their September 2015 episode.

To my surprise, they even caught the attention of business owners looking for writers to run their online magazines. Back in 2013, I got my first Managing Editor role thanks to my blog and an unexpected Twitter DM. Working with that site led me to another opportunity to work with a former celebrity blogger whom I greatly respected. She was looking to transition her brand and start a site geared towards empowering women of color. Between the profile I did on her years prior and my blog, my style of writing led her to reach out to help build the editorial content for her budding brand.

In 2015, I became the managing editor and feature writer of that site, which in turn brought more readers back to my personal blog that I still contributed to on occasion. Even when I lacked consistency in posting, I consistently received comments and feedback about how a particular post touched someone or how they resonated with my content. In all honesty, those comments were the most rewarding part of sharing my writing and vulnerabilities.

My Return to Blogging

Over the last decade, I’ve admittedly been on and off with my writing. Life has a way of distracting you from your purpose, even when there are signs that you’re on the right path. As I once again make my return to the online world, I can’t help but think about how I’ve received so many confirmations and opportunities simply because I was sharing my thoughts with the world.

Check out my 2019 interview with Jacqueline of “Amigapreneur” on Spotify.

Despite some who say blogging is dead, I’ve never felt more alive and excited about the possibilities of what blogging can still be.

Whether you’re blogging as a hobby and wanting to share your thoughts and expertise, looking to grow your business and using blogging to improve the SEO of your website, or hoping to make a living from writing and landing six-figure brand deals, never underestimate the power of your voice and how far it can take you.

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