Getting organized to create a blog website

Confession: I created a job for myself that I pay for instead of it paying me.

My primary job is being a stay-at-home parent and everyone knows we don’t get paid for that. It often saves the family money on childcare and the hassle of calling out of work and rearranging schedules when kids are home sick from school but “saving” money is not financially equivalent to not spending money on things. You see, the truth is, I am spending money on my made up writing “career” while also not earning money.

After I finished writing Dew Drop From Heaven, I busied myself with creating a website and blog because that was much less daunting than promoting my book on social media. I figured I just needed to get a few headshots, buy a domain name, and hire someone to design my website. Then I started to look at the price tags and wished I had never written my book in the first place. I had already spent money on things that helped me in the book writing process: a desk, a computer, an editor, printed copies for editing, etc. Gathering things for a website became an added cost (remember this is a self-created job). The headshots were a couple hundred dollars and the domain name just a bit more than that. The website design started at $1,000.00 for a professional and that is where I drew the line. Let’s remember that I don’t bring in any income as a stay-at-home parent. Spending my time as a writer and creating work for myself like maintaining a blog is also work that does not bring in income. So rather than earning money, I was just spending the family’s money on this website. That doesn’t really math very well if you know what I mean. 

Since I decided not to hire a web designer, I spent a few weeks learning how to design a website on my own. Youtube videos are helpful but I found it easier to learn without them. It was a whole lot faster to just type into ChatGPT what I wanted as a final result and it would spew out some code for me to copy and paste into the RSS feed for my website. Honestly, I don’t even know what an RSS feed is but I do know how to copy and paste. All I had to do was find the RSS feed (which ChatGPT helped me with) and then I just pasted in a bunch of stuff that it generated for me. For example, if I wanted my blog categories to be underlined when a mouse hovers over them, I just typed that into ChatGPT and it gave me code that I could put into the RSS feed to make that happen. I found that doing it myself by trial and error worked well for me because I didn’t have to communicate with anyone. I saved myself time from being misunderstood or having to try and explain whatever was in my mind to the designer. ChatGPT seemed to understand me pretty well and I didn’t have to wait for a response via email. Results were instant. 

Once the design of my website was mostly finished I had to figure out what I could realistically commit to as far as writing blogs on a regular basis. I had 6 blog categories and wanted to aim for a new blog post every 2 weeks. That came out to 27 blog posts for the year. To make it easy on myself and to keep it balanced, I made a quick spreadsheet that had 27 rows with all of the bi-weekly dates I needed for 2026. Then I started creating blog topics spread across each blog category. This came out to 5 posts on adoption, 4 on my faith journey, 5 on marriage, 4 on military life, 5 on parenting, and 4 on writing. Once I had each of my topics/titles, all I had to do was follow my schedule and start posting every 2 weeks. The benefit of doing it this way is that I don’t waste any time thinking about what to write week to week—I had already planned out the entire year in a matter of about 20 minutes. Now I just focus on writing and being accountable to myself. This blog is more for me than it is for anyone else. It keeps me active as a writer and just like any other form of exercise, if my writing muscle isn’t exercised on a regular basis, I will atrophy. 

My best advice if you want to create a blog website is this: don’t do it. Find a different hobby. But if you don’t like that advice and you want to move forward with writing a blog then do yourself a favor and set an attainable goal. Decide how many months you will commit to it and how many posts you will write. Then make a schedule. I know it sounds structured and inflexible to do it that way but writing is a discipline as much as it is an art and having the structure simply preserves your energy so you can create. You aren’t wasting any energy on thinking or planning when you don’t need to. Just give yourself one good planning session then go and meet that goal. 

This is blog 11 of 27 for year 2026. That’s close to halfway done and none of it has felt like work. I plan to keep my blog for 3 years and after that I’ll either retire it or keep it going but I don’t have to make that decision until 2028. My fellow writers, you don’t have to have all of the answers today. You simply need to decide if you are ready to commit or not. If you aren’t really going to commit to the regular posting on a blog then I’d advise you not to start one. The inconsistency won’t feel good to you and you’ll begin to question yourself and your ability and integrity as a writer. Don’t waste your life moments doing that.