GEORGE: It’s about nothing.

JERRY: No story?

GEORGE: No forget the story.

JERRY: You’ve got to have a story.

GEORGE: Who says you gotta have a story? Remember when we were waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show.

When I started blogging in 2004, I had an audience of exactly ONE. And, well, I was married to him.

This was back in the days of free blogging platforms and no one knew what monetization was and there were no brand ambassadors and there was certainly no Twitter and no one threw link-bait up on Facebook. This was back in the days of the small blogroll and before the days of paid product reviews.

I realized that if I wanted more than one person to read my site that I needed to do two important things. I needed to write and I needed to read. I wrote more content—better content—and I read other blogs and commented. I left my thoughts, my opinions, my commiserations on other sites like my own or sites that were completely different from my own.

Then, slowly, I had two readers.

And then four. And then forty. And then four hundred. And then four thousand. and then forty thousand…

Not much—for me—has changed since then. I still write Seinfeld-style. I get asked regularly what I write about and my answer is almost always that “it’s a blog about nothing.” I still continue to write 5 or 6 times a week. I still read other sites and I try to comment on them (I am committed to leaving 20 comments a day). I don’t do much advertising on my site and I have never been a brand ambassador for anything and I don’t do product reviews.

I’m a simple writer who just loves to write.

I write about me.

I write about my life. I write about my clothes, my work, my kids, my family, my friends, my celebrity crushes.

I’m a lifestyle blogger, if you will.

Over the past 7 years, I have met amazing people in this thing we call the blogosphere. I have met people who are Packers fans, who love anthropologie, who hate running. I have met people with precocious daughters and boys who love to read and first graders who won’t wear pants. I have met people who love Catan and love to be behind their cameras and who will eat cereal for dinner. I have met FRIENDS FOR LIFE. They are people who make me laugh, and make me cry, and make me think. They are people who would go to the ends of the earth for me, and for whom I would do the same.

For me, seven years later, this is still all about exactly two things:

THE WRITING AND THE READING.

THE WORDS AND THE COMMUNITY.

Lifestyle blogging was about this in the beginning and it’s still about this now. It’s about that silly thing your daughter said while you were in the public bathroom at the zoo. It’s about your date to the senior prom. It’s about your biggest fears. It’s about your grammar pet peeves. It’s about that man who farted on you on the subway. It’s about that dentist appointment that you missed. It’s about weighty issues. It’s about that car accident you got into when you went to see The Cranberries in high school. It’s about your first kiss. It’s about you, at 16. It’s about finding God inside of your nose. It’s about bucket lists—someday, but not today. It’s about learning what Victoria’s Secret actually is.

Next week I will be heading to Blissdom Canada to meet and connect and chat and talk and take part in a community that I love. I will also be representing my passion—lifestyle blogging—as a tribe leader with my co-leader (who was also once my co-worker) Haley-O. It’s ridiculously fitting that Blissdom lumped the two of us together.

I’m pretty sure if Haley and I hadn’t worked together at our day jobs, she may have never become a blogger. And I’m pretty sure if she didn’t get me my first paid writing gig, I wouldn’t have the job I have today. We are partners in bloggy crime…and we’d love to talk with you about how writing about nothing is truly writing about everything.

JERRY: And it’s about nothing?

GEORGE: Absolutely nothing.