Even though I’ve been developing web applications, administering web servers and managing web projects for nearly 13 years, it wasn’t until a few months ago (early July 2007) that I really got into blogging. I did knew what a blog was (duh!) but never gave much attention to the art of blogging itself.
I gotta say that the learning curve was surprisingly difficult in the beginning (and I am still learning a lot). As easy as some fellow bloggers might suggest, blogging on a regular basis isn’t as easy as it might looks.
Find A Good Topic
I see so many blogs about nothing an everything that are of little or no interest. Sorry but I don’t care if you post your grocery list on your blog. Find a topic you are passionate about and which might interest a community of people. This is called a niche. Not only must you be passionate about it, you must also know what you are talking about. I see lots of my-journey-to-making-money-online kind of blog, yet they barely have no readers. Why? Because readers probably won’t benefit much from your inexperience. They’d rather benefit from your expertise.
Get Familiar With The Blogging Community
First of all, you gotta get familiar with the blogging community. You just can’t be out there blogging alone, you gotta build yourself a small blogging network of topics related to your blog. You need to be active on those other people’s blog, comment their posts, voice your opinion. Just do that on a daily basis and you’ll find out that you’ll get tired of it fast if you don’t like it. Unless your blog has tons of traffic and you’re a very popular blogger, your presence on other blogs is crucial to yours.
Testing The Waters
Before you get overwhelmed in all the technical details of putting a blog together, give it a try by getting yourself a free blogging account at http://www.blogger.com or any other free blog hosting service. See if you can post on a regular basis without it becoming a pain in the *ss. By posting on a regular basis I mean that you gotta make yourself a posting schedule and stick to it. Don’t make 5 posts in a day and then not posting for 2 weeks. The more you post, the better. I post at least five times a week on TheWebmastersCafe.net. This may also give you an idea about the interest people may have in your blog.
Posting on a regular basis doesn’t mean you gotta write a post every day. For example, you could make five posts on monday and publish them one after another through the week using the timestamp tool.
Finally Get Yourself A Real Blog
If you can hang on, you’ll probably get addicted to blogging. I know I am more and more addicted to it everyday. So before you waste too many posts (and traffic!) on your free blogging account, get yourself your own blog. You’ll never be taken seriously using a free blogging service (although it might be good to try it out in the beginning).
Putting up a real blog might involve some technical skills so if you’re totally unfamiliar about it, you might wanna find somebody to help you out or simply outsource it. Getting yourself a real blog means:
- get used to the blogging glossary (you might wanna know what a pingback, a trackback or an RSS feed is!)
- buy yourself a nice domain name
- get a web hosting account
- install a free blogging application like Wordpress
- get a nice theme for your blog (the best would be to have a custom designed theme)
- brand your blog
And when you’ve got all of this setup, just don’t give up! You won’t get a reader basis within a week! But keep working hard and within a few months you’ll see stuff happening and within a year you could be really surprised!
November 5th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
[…] And most of all, ask yourself is blogging right for you? […]