Beyond the Rhetoric

When I first launched Beyond the Rhetoric way back in 2006, I had no idea how long it was going to last. Many new people were getting into blogging at the time and while most of them initially approached their blogs with a great deal of enthusiasm, many of them also threw in the towel within the first couple of months. When they didn’t get the readership numbers they had hoped for, when they didn’t see the thousands of dollars pouring in through their digital doors, they gave up.

But I persevered.

The truth is that Beyond the Rhetoric was far from my first foray into writing on the Internet. I had a Geocities page that I manually updated by typing in the raw HTML code for every single page. This meant that I was manually updating the homepage to reflect the new content too. But Beyond the Rhetoric was different. It was my first site that was powered by a proper blogging platform.

Yes, the first ever blog post was published using some rather clunky blogging software from GoDaddy, but it represented a major step in my blogging career and in my career of making money on the Internet. Beyond the Rhetoric has gone through a lot of changes in these last seven years, migrating over to WordPress and undergoing several redesigns, but I’m still here. And I’m still blogging six times a week.

It’s amazing to think that this is post number 2,500 on Beyond the Rhetoric. You have to remember that the 2,500 figure only accounts for blog posts published here on BTR. It does not count the thousands of other blog posts and online material that I have written and published across other websites, mostly for my freelance writing clients. It was three years ago that I celebrated the 1,500 blog post milestone. I said at the time that I was going to write (at least) 1,500 more and I’m only 500 posts away from reaching that goal.

The subject matter has varied greatly. I’ve written about the struggles of working from home, the video games that I like to play, and my take on how you should best manage your money. I’ve offered inspirational quotes from notable figures and clarified a range of grammar questions that readers may have. I guess a big part of the appeal of blogging, at least for me, is that I am not bound by any particular rules or limitations. I can write about what I want and I’m happy that you are here to read what I have to say. And I’m even happier when you join in on the discussion via the comments too.

The Internet is constantly evolving and there’s no way of saying where we’ll be in another seven years, but there’s a good chance that Beyond the Rhetoric will still exist in some form. And I hope that you’ll still be there to celebrate with me when I hit blog post number 5,000.