By Danielle Villegas | Member
While many people have interests outside of work, not as many necessarily have hobbies that are an extension of their work. While I do like to dabble in genealogy and knitting, I spend most of the little free time I have working on my technical communications blog, TechCommGeekMom.com. TechCommGeekMom isn’t the first blog I’ve written, but it’s the most fulfilling one.
I started blogging about ten years ago. A friend had a LiveJournal account and if you wanted to keep up with her you had to get an account to read her posts. I figured that I could try to post a few things on my account, simply to update other people as well. The next thing you know, I’m blogging whole “novellas,” as my husband would call them. It became cathartic for me, as it gave me an outlet to talk to many friends at once. I would write several other blogs after that. Like anything else in this world, the more you do it, the more it becomes routine. I don’t know if practice made perfect, but I definitely became comfortable with blogging.
I wrote a blog that was a requirement for my editing class in graduate school as my first foray into tech comm blogging. Initially, we would have to write posts that reflected our studies, but after a while I would contribute to my blog a little more often, reflecting on tech comm topics. I suppose that this first grad school blog was the pre-cursor to TechCommGeekMom. Sometimes, I still pull some of those old posts into TechCommGeekMom with updates or use them for inspiration.
In March 2012, I was unemployed and finishing up grad school. A social media class (which I loved) required writing a blog that would tie into social media outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, in order to create a community around a particular focus. At the same time, a classmate encouraged me to start a tech comm blog. He claimed that I had some good insights into tech comm topics. I also felt that showing my competence through these blog posts might help my employment prospects. From the convergence of unemployment, a grad school class, and the encouragement of a friend, TechCommGeekMom was born.
I have often been asked how I came up with the name, “TechCommGeekMom.” I have yet another friend who is an editor for a website called GeekMom.com. I identified with the target audience of that website very well and felt that my geeky ways were encouraged, especially as a mother, rather than discouraged. I wanted to celebrate being a geeky mom, and since I chose to concentrate on tech comm topics, I was the “tech comm” GeekMom, much like there is a Ginger Spice in the Spice Girls. If anyone asked me, I could confidently say that I was “TechCommGeekMom.”
Flash forward to today. I have used my blog to comment, share, and promote topics relating to tech comm and elearning—for better or worse. I never expected anyone to read my blog, but promoting it through various social media outlets certainly helped to create an audience. As a result, TechCommGeekMom has received about 12,000 hits since its launch, and it hasn’t stopped yet! I never anticipated that it would reach as many people as it has, or for it to yield so many fantastic opportunities for me. It has allowed me to “rub elbows” with leading thought specialists in the tech comm and elearning fields, attend conferences I would have otherwise missed, and have great writing gigs for these events. It still shocks me when someone stops me at a tech comm event to ask me, “Aren’t you TechCommGeekMom?”
I do my best to continue to post on my blog by curating content or posting original articles whenever I can. It’s a little harder now that I’m juggling a full-time job and parenting responsibilities as well, but I keep doing it. Why? Because blogging has given me a voice, and I like to be heard. My blog has opened doors for me that I would’ve never guessed in a million years that I’d be stepping through. I’ll keep doing TechCommGeekMom as long as I can, as it’s a great way for me to spend my free time—talking with others and gaining more opportunities to grow and learn in the tech comm field in the process.
