Would you believe that Tuesday was my five year anniversary of blogging?

I’ve made mention before that I started blogging to establish an ‘online presence’ as was suggested by an agent at a small library event I’d attended. I decided on a blog because I’d heard about it in the movie, “Julie and Julia.” I’m pretty sure at that time I didn’t really know WHAT a blog was, just that this woman, Julie became a published author through blogging.  Sounds like a plan to me I said, I’ll become a famous author by writing a blog.

Now I’ll be the first person to tell you that I don’t know nearly enough about blogging as I should, especially for someone who’s been blogging for as long as I have. I do however know a whole lot more than I did on that very first post.

Because guess what?

I knew absolutely NOTHING about blogging at the time. The first line from my first post was this, “I have the basic idea for this website from the movie Julie and Julia; except I’m not going to be cooking and eating my way through a book of recipes.”  If you want to read that entire 108 word post, you can read about it HERE.

Of course that changed, as I began to hone in on ‘finding my voice,’ (which I struggled with initially.) The goal that first year was to publish one post per day for an entire year, so I titled the initial posts as “Day One and Day Two.” I didn’t actually start adding real titles to the posts until Day Three.

When I looked at those initial posts in my ‘back office’, I noticed that none of them had SEO Titles, SEO descriptions or SEO key words. I started scrolling through to see when I first started adding them and guess what? I got bored after scrolling through the first YEAR! Yes! It was OVER A YEAR (maybe two or three even) before I started working the SEO on this blog.

No wonder I haven’t become famous.

I didn’t even add photos until Day Twenty Five.  In case you’re wondering, here is the very first picture I ever placed in a blog post.

I had to shrink this picture to fit in this post because it was SO large, it took up the entire page, BECAUSE I had no idea about re-sizing pictures at that time. In fact, I’m surprised I actually put a title on the damn thing.

It DOES look good though, doesn’t it? That my friends is an Apple-Pecan upside down pie and it’s to die for. It is probably the dessert I miss the most in being Gluten-Free because I haven’t figured out a way to replicate it. (If you’re interested, the full recipe for it is HERE.)

I recently read somewhere that you have to stick with blogging for three to five years, to outlast all the others that start and then quit.  Well here we are five years later, and I’m left wondering, what’s left for me? Where do I go from here? Because well, obviously I haven’t quit, but I haven’t ‘made it’ yet either.

Maybe it’s the end of year blues, or the holiday doldrums, but sometimes I just want to stop altogether, but the thought of NOT having my blog, makes me anxious. And yet, I sometimes feel like after five years of blogging, what’s left to say?

Update two. Linda and I have removed the linky tool from our blogs as it appears to be slowing them down.

A quick update, apparently there are issues with the Linky Tool. I hope Mr. Brent is working on this and will have it fixed soon. I apologize to everyone that’s trying to link up. Please bear with us and keep trying.

This is the Thursday Barks and Bytes Blog Hop hosted by 2 Brown Dawgs and Heart Like a Dog. Grab the badge and the linky code and join us! Please only link up blog posts and as a courtesy to the other hoppers, please add the linky to your post and/or link back to the hosts’ blogs.