What Advice Would You Have Given Yourself When You Started Blogging?

Looking back at the lessons you have learnt from blogging, if could give yourself advice when you were about to start blogging, what would you say? That does sound like a very teacher-ish question, apologies. Darren from Problogger is celebrating his 3rd birthday….I mean the blog is celebrating its 3rd birthday. He is giving away a lot of cool prizes, and all you have to do is write about blogging tips. Seeing as that is one of my main focuses here, that is not too difficult. You may have read some of these before.

Advice:

Write articles not blog posts. I try to create as much timeless content as possible. I like the thought that all the work I do is ultimately creating a resource. If you have 50 articles which are all a resource in their own right, then you have something that is of value. Where as, if you have 50 blog posts about what was important at the time you have nothing of value later.

Make sure you have time to do a proper job. How much time do you have to commit, and is that going to be enough.

Set realistic goals, and strive to achieve them.

Don’t neglect your girlfriend, nothing on your blog is that interesting.

Write to an audience, even if you don’t have one.

Perfectionism may be a form of procrastination, but as long as you are aware that you just spent an hour and a half getting that feed burner panel looking just right it’s all good.

Don’t take mean comments to heart, it’s much easier for someone to rip into your work and say what is wrong with it, than for them to create something good themselves.

Focus on quality as much as possible. People say quantity is important. Maybe I am wrong, but I think you’re better to post 2-3 good posts a week, than to post 7-14 rubbish ones. People only have so much time to spend reading blogs. You want them to be impressed when they come to your blog. And you don’t want subscribers to have to read rubbish that you are just pounding out for the sake of posting regularly. That may mean it takes longer to become popular, but unless you have a lot of time to commit, posting good content every day is hard work.

Write well researched interesting content, the type of stuff you would read yourself. Learn to look at yourself from the outside, is what you have written really worth submitting to a social media site? Or Are you dreaming?

Be unique, you don’t always have to follow the crowd. Just because other blogs have become successful writing about a subject, it doesn’t mean you will.