I’m so tired of reading posts and listening in on panels that talk about what it takes to be a professional blogger or how to profit off of blogging. Yes, there are folks who can make a living doing it, yes there are CEO’s and entrepreneurs who can use it to expand their businesses, yes there are some blogs that give traditional media publications a run for their money in terms of credibility, originality, and coverage. In my opinion, it means nothing if the person writing the blog doesn’t like doing it.

When I was 8 years old, my father gave me a journal. This was the first volume of 5 that I kept over the course of my childhood. I wrote almost daily in these notebooks and when I was 11, I started my first AOL profile page, a site that I consider to be my first “blog.” Since then, I’ve moved onto sites like LiveJournal, Blurty, MovableType, TypePad, MySpace, Blogger, Tumblr, and of course WordPress (zomg, <3 WordPress). With the exception of a few, the majority of these blogs were all private.

These days, everyone seems to be so engrossed in the public nature of their blogs, traffic stats via Google Analytics, monetization using targeted ad words, SEO, reader subscriptions, comments, etc. I’m interested in Back To Basics Blogging, which for me is blogging for myself. It means blogging with purposeful passion and doing it because I love it.

I encourage people to blog because we’re humans with thinking capabilities and opinions worth sharing. I encourage people to blog because life is beautiful and worth documenting for posterity. I fantasize about my Grandkids Googling my posts and saying, “Wow, Grandma was pretty awesome when she was our age.”

I’ve recently revisited those journals I mentioned and I noticed that even as an 8 year old, I had the right idea. I wrote daily and I wrote honestly.  I wrote about whatever I felt like.  I wrote for one person – me.

To anyone interested in reviving a blog, give yourself a little blog CPR with B2BB. Challenge yourself to write one post every day for a period of forty consecutive days. Don’t feel limited to one particular topic either. Instead, write about what you’re feeling on that particular day, whether it’s an opinion, an emotion, or an inquiry. If you’re naturally passionate about something, a common thread will emerge.

Think it’s too much?  Start a Tumblr account.  Tumblr will force you to put *something* out there, whether it’s a link, a written post, a photograph, a video, whatever it is that inspires you.  It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s not about ads, it’s not about comments.  It’s about one thing – content.