How Blogging Changed My Life

I started blogging back in college. Bishport.com was my repository for all things Macromedia Flash related. At the time I was teaching an interactive media class at UMass Amherst. I tried to take what I learned as a teacher to my readers.

Over time I became a regular in forums like Kirupa and Actionscript.org, all the while slowly getting hits to my blog. It was in one of these forums that I began to realize that the world had a bad interpretation of Flash’s potential in the future of the internet. This was largely due to a rising amount of “SEO gurus” putting flash down every chance they got. I decided to write a couple of blog posts addressing the Flash/SEO problems so many people thought they were having. That post is my second most popular post to date.

My most popular blog post is the source code to a cool flame effect I made awhile back. I started to see the benefit of giving things out for free to get attention. At the time I had no actual goals accept that it felt kind of good to get recognition for a lot of my hard work.

Then one day I was approached by a marketing company do to some flash work. The project went without a hitch and discussions of a full time job started coming up. With little to no previous experience in this type of work environment, my application was in jeopardy. However, I was able to land the job on a trial bases because of the portfolio I had created on my blog.

Six months later I had been reading about how social media could be used as another communication channel for businesses. I had always believed this was an obvious progression and eventually shared my excitement with the rest of my company. A couple months and several blog posts later we started my company’s blog and adopted a whole social media strategy. I’ve gone from Flash programmer to Internet Marketing Specialist in under one year.

Then I met the 20 Something Bloggers community, a whole different reason to blog with a whole new bunch of friends. Blogging was hard at first because none of my friends could understand it. Now I’ve got a community of people just like me, the job I always wanted and a roommate who can blog with the best of them.

I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. I love showing people how blogging can change their life. I’m currently trying to bring my family with me. My father is catching on better than my mom and my sister is old school with her MySpace blogs. If they finally catch on I’ll have the perfect trifecta of communities on the web; family, friends and business.