I mean I’m starting a blog without knowing how to start a blog and one of the key components is that I find people who are interested in what I’m writing so naturally one of the first things to do is look up how to start a blog. Has anyone ever googled ‘How to start a blog?’ The information is WHOLLY overwhelming. Well I can tell you, I’ve been doing it, and the amount of things you should have in place before starting a blog makes you want to give up before even starting! Who knows what a SEO is raise there hand (and no its not a CEO role for blogging)! What about a landing page, pillar articles, CTA and RSS? No? Well obviously you haven’t gone to Blogging University.
First of all the majority of posts dedicated to ‘how to start a blog’ should really be read as ‘how to make money from starting a blog’. And am I the only one who finds it ironic that there are so many persons blogging about starting a blog? And those are only the blog advice bloggers! What about what seems to be the millions of travel bloggers, food bloggers, fitness bloggers and everything else in-between! I didn’t realize everyone and their grandmother was sitting down blogging!
So how do I, Matthew, son of Rory, first of his namesake dare to launch a blog in 2017 and hope that there are persons out there to read it? One of the biggest recurring themes seems to be find your general topic and then zone into a niche’ within that and sometimes even zone in further and make sure you’re writing relevant posts that your readers want to see but that’s basically DON’T STRAY FROM YOUR TOPIC. But unless I move to Mars and colonize, at this point how am I going to find a niche that 10 other people haven’t done before me? And furthermore what if I WANT to stray from the topic and write about something random that I thought was funny or helpful or just a good read, is there some kind of Blog Regulation Committee that’s going to put me back into my little box?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I wont be able to live by the ‘20 ways to make your blog successful’ and thankfully I don’t have to. I’m well aware that many of the people who blog make a living from doing so and therefore the time and energy they have to spend in making a blog is equivalent to a full time job. Some have editors, hire Photoshop workers, pay for promotion, plan posts weeks and months in advance. Of course I’m going to take advice of what’s practical and do-able to engage readers but I definitely don’t want that small voice in my head (or pressure) telling me how many ‘how to’ posts I need to write or that I have to end each post with a question to solicit opinions from readers. I’m not saying I wont want to, I’m just saying I’m happy to try blogging on my own terms.
Cheers!