Falling in love again with blogging #highered and #hesm – after 10 years

This post is #8 in a series of 10 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this blog while looking back at the past decade in higher ed digital marketing and communications.

Happy 10th Birthday, Baby Blog!

I understand this can sound cheezy to some of you, my dear readers, but I only get sentimental over this little blog every 10 years. And, today is the day!

I don’t have cute black & white “baby” pictures, but I do have a screenshot and a link to the first post :-)

10 years ago, I wrote a post not having a clue that I’ll still write here after a decade – now, THAT’s a testament to “owned media” as the higher ed marketers and communicators would say :-)

I’ve been blogging for more than a decade. I caught the blogging bug 16 years ago while working for About.com as an editor and a guide. At About.com, bloggers were called “guides” back then, but they were definitely blogging. And, thinking about it, I really started to “blog” 20 years ago as a correspondent for a daily newspaper – yes, it was in print, but still very close to what we call blogging today.

Platforms change, but goals and needs don’t, right?

Falling in love again with blogging

I’m not done yet with this series of 10 posts on the past decade in higher ed marketing and communication, but something unexpected has happened while writing a post every day (except on weekends, because my 2 sons own these 2 days :-)

When I decided to write 10 posts to celebrate 10 years:

• I didn’t set an editorial calendar.
• I didn’t research keywords to find topics with traction.
• I didn’t define a content strategy for this blogging series.

I didn’t do any of what I teach – and sometimes preach – in my course on social media marketing for higher ed, because I wanted this series to be a work of love – not “content marketing.”

It’s been quite successful so far, as it’s not over yet and have fallen in love again with blogging, thinking and looking beyond the latest tactics or best practices.

There’s nothing wrong with tactics, but it’s good to shake things up after 10 years, you know, to keep things interesting — and experience again those first thrills.

That’s how I feel today, so thank you so much for making this possible. I’m not sure I could keep writing if I knew NOBODY was reading (and Google Analytics tells me some of you are :-)