I've had a blog off and on ever since I first learned html when I was 14. I enjoy writing for fun and my mom and sister-in-law enjoy reading what I write ;). I've never monetized or really promoted it much.
Since November 2014 when my husband and I got home from our honeymoon, we've been working intensely to pay off $55,421 in debt. $1600 was leftover from the honeymoon 0% credit card and the rest was my husband's student loans all at 6.8%. People were asking us a ton of questions about when we were going to buy a house, etc. after the wedding. So when we responded that we were going to pay off student loans first, they had a lot of questions. And skepticism.
Mostly over the past 20 months, I've blogged about our progress and things we'd learned to help our budgeting go more smoothly. I occasionally did a bit more general finance blog about financial health metrics or money decisions in relationships. I do a couple posts a month usually and I'll share a link on my facebook or twitter and call it a day. I'm not jonesing for hits, but to satisfy curiosity, a post will get 50-80 hits in the couple days after I post it. So it's not been anything to write home about by any means, and that's how I prefer it.
Why do I blog? I wanted a record to look back on throughout the payoff and after it was over. It was nice to have somewhere to record our thoughts and feelings and also to share what we'd learned. It's cool seeing a post from month 2 about how we had to keep a running total at the grocery store on our last trip of the month to make sure we didn't go over, then write in month 20 about how these 5 changes in the way we bought food and toiletries have made our grocery/toiletries budget feel spacious. It's fun to see that progress in ourselves.
As for "helping others" as referenced above, I've had long conversations or ongoing dialogue with 7 friends who've asked for help with budgeting or figuring out a cashflow problem or strategies for paying off debt. They all read one of my blogs and then asked me questions privately about how we handle X situation. My sister (not included in the 7) was inspired to pay off a loan early to save on interest and free up cashflow. I'm not intending to change anyone's life, but I think people have appreciated following our debt payoff and maybe it has helped them realize they can take control of their finances too.
We're going to be debt free July 8, so I'm not sure what I'll do with the blog after that. I might keep it up for another couple months as we figure out how we're going to allocate the $2700/month that will now be freed up.
ETA: We keep it somewhat vague on actual numbers. I post at the top of each blog how much debt we have left, so someone could theoretically do the math and figure out about how much we put towards debt in the time between blogs. But we don't put anything about our salaries. In some of the posts about our budgeting, I did include percentage breakdowns of where our money goes.