 There, I'm Sandy. Welcome to the studio where I'm going to do a little vlog today because I'm having a good hair day. I love being able to have cooler weather so my hair can be down instead of up in a ponytail or in a bun, which is where it's been for this long hot summer we had and it's been nice for the last month or two to see the weather cooling down. Yay! I also got new pair of glasses and the two of them together made me a little excited. I set up my camera along with my microphone and my sound board and e-cam and just all the stuff that it takes when I shoot a vlog because it's a different setup than when I'm shooting my artwork and when I moved everything earlier this year I lost track of which plug went into which other plug and how it all came together but I think I've got it figured out now. Yay! I'm going to be posting a piece of artwork over here. I don't know what it is yet because I haven't created it but you can watch that if you'd rather watch it than me which is totally fine. I would love your feedback by the end of this video on whether or not you found yourself wanting to watch that and just listen to me or do you need to see the face thing because I don't really like having my face out here all that much but I would love seeing somebody do some artwork and chat with me about something as opposed to the face but I'm going to let you weigh in on that as well as maybe some topics that you might have in your brain that I should talk about. Okay? My subject for today is why the heck am I still blogging in 2021? There's a lot of people who have stopped blogging. I've asked a lot of friends who have stopped why they did. A number of them have said it's because they just can't find subscribers anymore. Nobody is subscribing to blogs. I've had other people who said that they just didn't build the community that they had hoped to build and they weren't getting comments. They weren't getting feedback. That's what they wanted was feedback from people on what they were creating and they just didn't get that anymore. Other people said it was because the expense of hosting a blog was higher than the income that they were making from affiliate links. What that means is when you shop using someone's links in general if they have an affiliate disclosure they are going to get a percentage of the income from whatever you purchase but they also have to pay for their website. They have to pay for perhaps the URL that they purchase. They have to pay for if they use a service to deliver the blog to someone like MailChimp or something which is what I use. It just doesn't balance out anymore because people aren't using affiliate links nearly as much as they used to and the cost of running a blog is higher than that so people have made the choice to just stop blogging entirely. So that said I'm going to give you my reasons for why I am still blogging after all these years. First one is because of my longtime subscribers because I've been blogging since 2007. I have people who have been with me for a really long time and they like to get their content sent to them via email or via whatever whatever way it is that they get it if it's a feed reader or something and there are some people who regularly comment either on the blog or they reply to an email that they've gotten about the blog post and they give me their feedback. I know there's a bunch of people out there like that God bless you all I love you all and for the nine people who regularly comment the most on my blog all the time I'm gonna be heading to the grocery store after I get done with this video can I pick you up a pack of gum or something because you know we tight all right that's reason number one reason number two is because of SEO search engine optimization now I am terrible at doing SEO you're supposed to write your post in such a way that the first paragraph has this in it the second paragraph has that and then there's a bolded sentence and then something at the end there's like just all kinds of craziness that I never learned so I don't do any of that but what I figure is I have a bunch of words on my blog post that Google can look at and go this is what that blog post is about and when you type something in that has those keywords in it then Google might send you my blog post yes they sometimes will send a YouTube video when you're looking for something but YouTube only has so many words in the title and maybe that first sentence I feel like my blog posts are gonna do that a little bit better even if I'm not good at SEO stuff the third reason I continue to blog in 2021 is I have so much work to organize I could easily let go of all that stuff from the past and let it fly away and disappear never to be seen again but after all the work of making more than a thousand videos I don't want to lose all that stuff so what I have chosen to do in 2021 is to put together blog posts where I collect each one of those into themes so on one Saturday I'll put out a post that has all of my fall and Halloween videos in one big post another one I'll do all of my Copic intermediate stuff another one I'll do my beginner watercolor and all year long I've been doing these so there's a ton of them out there and several people have told me they feel like classes because even though they're not organized in a you know here's step one build on it with step two build on that with step three they're on a theme and so they kind of go together and they feel like a free class that you're getting just on my blog and I want to share an idea that Marcia gave me she gave me permission to tell you her story she loved one of these posts so much and she had gone through and done each one of the tutorials with other stamps that she had and she said it felt like she had been in a class and that it was worth a lot to her and she was amazed that it was just free right there on my blog and she wanted to know how she could just send me money for it and I recommended she become a patron because patrons sent a little bit each month and she was super happy with that she didn't feel guilty about getting all that free content and all the work that I'd put into it so I really appreciate that from her so Marcia welcome to the patron family and I just love that all of these posts are arranged with these big juicy photos I really like that the tiny postage stamp photos in YouTube do nothing for me so I enjoy being able to look through my own work and looking back over history and seeing where I've come from how my work has changed over time and being able to organize my blog search through it find things that you're looking for somebody recently looked for a puffin they said you did a puffin recently I don't remember what it was I could just type the word puffin into my my dashboard on the backside and all of a sudden all my puffin post came up and I could find the one that she wanted it was very easy so having my blog keeps me organized that way I can find everything the fourth reason why I am going to blog for the continuous future as far as I can see is what happened a few weeks ago you might remember we had an outage of Facebook and Instagram for about six hours the world went into a panic oh my goodness what happens there were rumors that went around that all of that content was gone that it was wiped out all your pictures all your everything gone I just went and took a walk I went drawing with some friends I did other things I did not panic and then came back everything was fine and they've kind of had some tweaks that they've been doing over time but it's mostly back and it got me thinking about how important it is to have my content somewhere else what happens if Facebook just goes the way of my space and implodes they've been losing usership like crazy in the last year or two and it's dropping like a rock maybe Facebook is going to implode I don't know I don't want all my content just there I want it somewhere where I can access it if something happens on Facebook or Instagram or wherever so having it on my blog means if some new social media pops up there's some new site that we all migrate to at some point I don't know what that's going to be but I still have the reservoir of all of my content that I can go and populate on the new site and be able to share that with more people for my foreseeable future blogging is part of my world everything is going to end up on my website so that I have that repository you may want to consider at least having a folder in your hard drive where you keep everything don't trust it all to a social media because you never know what's going to happen so I hope this was helpful if you have any thoughts on the whole topic please feel free to leave them in the comments down below as well as let me know if you would rather watch that than this because I'd be curious what you think I will see you guys later peace out