Week 9: From Frosty Morning Walks to Finished Blogs: How Dictation Has Helped Revive My Blogging and Grew My Traffic – My Blogging Diary.

by Chris Harris

Rediscovering Momentum After the Book

With the three month hiatus of writing the book finally behind me, or at least moved firmly into the background, I’m back to blogging with an energy I didn’t realise I’d missed. Last week I published seven blogs, and although it’s only Wednesday, I already have drafts for five more. This sudden surge isn’t because I’ve become superhuman overnight but because of something that, to me, feels like a genuine discovery. I know seasoned bloggers will roll their eyes, but I am not especially technical. I’m not a dunce.

I run an online business and can put a blog together, but being in my fifties, the nuances of the  deeper technical world of media never came naturally. Over the weekend, my partner showed me how to dictate product descriptions into ChatGPT so I could drop them straight onto Etsy and the other selling platforms I use for selling antiques. I cannot overstate how transformative this is for me. Being impatient, I often wrote bare minimum descriptions. Now I can dictate far more detail with ease. I’d tried dictation before with Microsoft Word, but it never worked properly, stopping and starting, mishearing half of what I said. In contrast, ChatGPT has been excellent at deciphering my ramblings. It feels like a genuine breakthrough, and quite possibly a very big one for the business, because better descriptions lead to better sales.

Blogging While Walking

Once I realised how well this worked, it struck me: why not use the same approach for the blog? So here I am, on a beautiful winter’s morning, walking through the frost covered fields and meadows outside Lewes, effectively writing a blog as I go. This is always my best time for thinking. Usually, ideas drift in and out as I walk, and I tell myself I’ll write them down when I get home, but work gets in the way, life gets in the way, and the mental notes pile up until my brain feels overloaded.

I walk twice a day, two miles each time, giving me more than an hour of wandering thoughts. To be able to dictate them instantly is nothing short of transformative. On this very walk, I’ve already dictated a blog about upcycling shelves, and now this one. It solves one of my biggest challenges: lack of time. The business is thriving, and I’m still juggling tasks related to the book, promotion, platforms, outreach, so being able to “write” while walking is a gift. I can easily produce ten blogs a week now, one per walk, without carving extra time out of the day. The scenery is lovely, of course, but the truth is that these walks are for exercise and mental clarity. Being able to create as I go feels like the most natural extension of that. By the time I get home, I will have two blogs ready to edit, add photos to, and publish.

Seeing Growth the Organic Way

The good news is that after the ten to twelve weeks away from blogging while working on the book, the stats are already climbing. They rose twenty percent up to last month, and now—since restarting the blog—they’re up thirty percent. It isn’t a dramatic spike, but steady, encouraging growth that reflects the effort I’ve put in.

I always say I’m right at the beginning of a blogging career, but I’m genuinely pleased with how it’s developing: being picked up by Google search, seeing views increase in a healthy, sustained way. Having run businesses all my life, I know numbers go up as well as down, but over three months you get a real sense of direction, and the direction is positive.

The simple ability to dictate while walking, something that feels almost rudimentary to many people, is going to be transformative for me. I’m never short of things to write about, quite the opposite, and now I can finally capture them all. With ten blogs a week instead of the usual five, the blog will grow at twice the pace. And as I mentioned in recent entries, I’ve stopped bothering to post links on Facebook or other social media because I find it unbearably dull. I much prefer organic growth. This small shift in method feels like a significant leap forward, one that will make the whole process easier, quicker and far more enjoyable.

#Blogging #Blogging For Amateurs #Self Publishing #Blog Diary #Learning To Blog