Remarkablogger

I’m doing a special series of guest posts this week on Remarkablogger. I’ve invited several up-and-coming bloggers to describe how they got started in blogging, how it helps their business, and how blogging helped them grow as a human being.

This post is by Jenny Gniadecki, whom I met at SOBCon ‘08 and thought she was completely awesome.

Hi. I’m Jen. I’m a freelance writer living in Chicagoland (for those that may not know, people say they live in Chicagoland so they don’t have to admit they live in a suburb no one has ever heard of.) I currently write for a couple Fortune 500 companies (and a few smaller companies) and am looking to do more financial writing. My secret-Spidey-superpower is explaining complex things in ways that are easy to understand - sorely lacking in the financial sector. Plus I bought my first stocks last week and I’m hooked!

Guest posts are so yummy. They allow me to share things I might not feel entirely comfortable posting on my own blog. My apologies in advance if this isn’t like the other entries. It got a little schmaltzy and I’m not sure how that happened.

Oh, yeah. I decided to be honest in my answers.

Why you started blogging

I’ve never told anyone this before.

I started blogging after someone I cared about very much committed suicide. My friends and family didn’t like the person, so it was pretty much on my own for comfort. No one wanted to hear about how sad I was, because they would just say how much better off I was without this person being around. True or not, I needed to be able to tell someone how broken I felt, and the Internet was there to listen.

Since I started blogging in November of 2001 I have shared things online my friends never heard, I forged friendships with people I never met, and I felt the support a community of strangers can provide. They didn’t judge my relationship or care if I was or was not better off with this person dead. They knew and understood my pain. Through them, I found what I needed to heal.

Not to sound completely melodramatic, but blogging probably saved my life.

I also learned two very important lessons:

1. I needed to get better friends. (I since have gathered some amazing friends and dumped the blowhards that called me specifically to tell me how NOT sorry they were my person had died.)
2. Don’t judge the relationships of others. (I leave that to people who can judge and not realize how horribly wrong they might be.)

How blogging helps your business

Blogging has helped my business immensely. I’m a freelance writer now, but it has been a long winding road to get here. I did Internet marketing for a couple years, I was a virtual assistant for a couple years…heck, I even did customer service before the kids were born (that’s how I learned I stink at customer service.) Through it all I have been writing and through writing I’ve processed the experiences I had. Writing a rant about my work is how I learned what I did and did not like doing. Some rants were just “in the moment” and other rants I would go back to and think, “I really did hate doing that.” Every post was a step closer to finding what I really wanted to be doing.

Now that I’m pretty settled into being a freelance writer, everything I’ve ever blogged is now a sample piece of work. My voice is what I sell, so even the mommyblog is one big writing sample.

My email signature line lists all of my blogs as well as my writing portfolio. Being syndicated on Reuters.com and The Chicago Sun Times Online really helps with my crediblity when talking with potential clients.

How blogging helped you discover yourself and grow as a human being

Blogging has been an emotional security blanket since day one. My blog is a place where I can be vulnerable, human, and share mistakes I’ve made. It is also the place where I can scream from my own rooftop about successes and lucky breaks I experience.

When I talk to a person, I focus on that person. That means I’m only showing part of my personality. My blogs allow me to be myself. Really myself. I can focus on me and what I’m doing and that makes me feel I don’t have to hide or I’m not keeping part of who I am a secret because no one wants to know.

We all share the same basic emotions, blogging reminds me of that every day and lets me feel I’m still part of the world even if I spend the majority of my time in my home office with my kids playing nearby.

Sure, through the years I’ve had friends that got mad and forwarded blog pages to others and I’ve learned how much is too much to share. But these lessons taught me boundaries that help me every day in business as well as in my personal life.

Jenny writes at Beyond Mom and Jennifer Gniadecki - Freelance Writing for the Masses!. You can follow Jenny on Twitter