I’ve read many bloggers around the web who recommend buying a domain name and setting up your blog with a web hosting service. That is considered the de-facto standard or professional way to setup a blog.
However, while I agree with that thinking for the most part, I found myself in a casual conversation recently with someone who wanted to start blogging. He asked me what I recommend he do to get started blogging. He wanted to start blogging for more than just family and friends. Sure, easy question (not really). 🙂
I told them I had been blogging for around six months and that I’m also helping my wife with her blog. I knew the person I was talking to and he’s not too technical of a person. He has a young family – wife and two kids under 10 years old. I know their kids are involved in after school activities that keep the whole family busy as well as all the regular stuff young families do together – home at night in front of the television, helping with homework, going here and there, etc.
My first thoughts were, tell this guy he doesn’t have the time. Which, if you’ve been blogging regularly for 1-3 months, you know the time commitment.
I decided to give him the keep it short and get to the point way of blogging. I also knew he had a Gmail account so I told him to browse over to www.blogger.com which is now owned by Google and since he had a Gmail account use his Gmail login to get started.
I briefly talked to him about some of the stuff you learn about blogging as you start a new blog, like:
- It’s harder than heck. DANG!! 🙂
- What do you want to write about?
- Who’s your audience? Who do you see coming back to your blog day-after-day, week-after-week, month-after-month, year-after-year.
- Do you think you can write decent blog articles regularly enough so that when you get some readers they’ll come back to your blog?
- Do you want to make money with your blog?
- Is your family going to understand that even though you work a “normal” job 8 hours a day that you want to write your blog during your own time?
- Do you have “your own time?”
- Can you have “your own time” without interruptions?
- Will you make any of your family members mad? “You used to have time for us.”
- What will you do if you become addicted to it?
- Will you know if you’re addicted to it?
- Will your “normal” job be affected by your blogging in such a way that the quality of your work that you do for your “normal” job suffers?
- Watch out if you find yourself blogging on a night that you and your spouse used to call “Date Night”. If so, then most likely you’re addicted to blogging and your spouse will soon start acting differently towards you. 🙂 Like in a bad way.
I told him if he was really serious about blogging, to go home and fire up his favorite word processing program like Microsoft Word or WordPad and write 3 articles that are at least 500 words long and email them to me within a week.
This exercise would force him to find time to write, write about something that holds his and my interest for more than 500 words (which isn’t too long).
Well, we’ll see what happens. Which brings up a question – How many blogs out there were started and then stopped within a year? We know there are tons of blogs in the blogospere, but I’m wondering how many are just sitting there that were worked on for less than a year and it’s been at least a year since the last post. Hmmmm…
I also emailed him this link to receive a free and very valuable pdf from professional blogger Yaro Starak – The Blog Profits Blueprint.
[techtags: Blogging, Yaro Starak]
Leave a Reply