Being a creative person on the internet has been hard over the last 10 or so years for me. I went from being somewhat successful in the world of YouTube guitar players back in 2008 to losing my channel then discovering blogging and freelance writing, which took me down the path I’m on now. I constantly have to remind myself that I prefer writing and chatting on podcasts more than I did feeling awkward on camera producing YouTube content. To be honest even if I’d stuck it out the guitar content has fallen into the click bait world of YouTube now too, so wouldn’t have been comfortable making it anyway.

There so much vying for attention with the addition of social networks and click bait favouring algorithms that keeping going with your own thing is hard.

I’ve been demoralised at stages in the last few years with my blog, realising that not many people want to help support you. My failed patreon was also having a negative impact on my confidence levels and I’ve completely removed this link now from the site. If you can make it work then great but from my experience unless you already have a large following somewhere else it just didn’t work out for me.

I think my issue was that I was trying to ‘make it’ in the world of being an independent journalist but have quickly come to the realisation that you can’t make a living doing this alone in this day and age. I’ve given up trying to ‘make it’, hell I can’t even get other professional bloggers or journalists to give me feedback and publications and some podcast networks only pick guests from their inner circle.

What has helped me keep going though has been finding a smaller niche group of people that actually read my stuff and give me feedback. I’ve also found more smaller creators that I’ve had some great interactions with and have given me the energy to keep going.

I’ve also found that I enjoy just writing what I’m passionate about. I’m not competing with any site I just want to share my thoughts on stuff and not worry about sticking to a particular theme.

I guess what I’m trying to say is (I’m trying not to ramble) if you read someone’s content out there, especially from an independent like me please engage with it. RT, like, cross post, comment – do anything you can to let them know that you’ve read it (it’s also not rude to point out typos by the way).

So, it’s this interaction that keeps me going. I have no financial dependence on this blog at all, it’s a passion project as is my podcast but for us small creators please let us know what you think of our stuff.

Thanks to everyone that’s engaged with me on my content, even that little like you may have done on Twitter really helped me out that day to produce something else.

Finally, in the spirit of sharing others work here are some fine folks that have really helped me keep going over the last few months.

• Jeff Perry at Rocket Panda
• Andy over at The Dent
• Daryl Baxter
• Greg
• Chris Lawley