Everything I learned about blogging (so far)

Many a times I have attempted to start a new blog. Each new blog brings with it a distinct excitement of bringing to the world something new and (generally) my own. Like a child's toy gathering cobwebs in the closet though, my old blogs sit in the dashboard of my blogger account going unopened for months and years at a time. Just like the said child who uses begs his parents for the toy, using every opportunity to hint at it, I work out all the details of the blog before I put pen to paper, so to speak.

And then I actually start working on the blog and a strange but all to familiar thing happens, I lose interest. There is no shortage of the reasons behind my loss of interest. I know less about the subject then what I originally thought. There are better resources for what I blog about leading me to question the blogs purpose. I often underestimate the difficulties of focusing an individual blog losing scope of the main purpose in the process.

Unsurprisingly, I am not alone in this matter among my fellow bloggers. It may be obvious to an individual starting a blogger blog that, blogger is a blog graveyard(try saying that 3 times fast). Registering a .blogspot domain often proves difficult, even seemingly obscure domains i.e. seekingbeta.blogspot.com, are taken. The most upsetting part is these blogs often become one-hit wonders, where the author stops writing after a few posts.

With that said, as I work on my latest blog, I have more experience to build on now then when I started with my first "Great Idea," experience I will gladly share to anyone who wants to listen.

1) Have a general concept in terms of subject matter established. Even if it changes later, you will be able to better control how that change happens.

2)Post! The more you post and the more you see your blog grow the more you will want to keep it growing. Set a posting schedule, like once a week to help keep you on task.

3) Find something you are naturally interested in, something that you either know a lot about or are always looking to learn about. This blog for instance, is a repository for the most interesting stuff I come across as I scour the internet, as well as stuff that I have been thinking about and want to expend upon or look into.

4) Write to be heard. I cannot stress this one enough, even if nobody reads your writing you want to write as though you have a million hits a day. I believe one of the biggest reasons new blogs fail is because the author sees no purpose in continuing to write when the world wide web already contains everything one wants to know.

5) To expand on number 4. Be original, be creative and be you. If you believe in what you say and you write to convey a message all else will follow.

6) Use new technology. This option was for the most part unavailable to me when I started my first blog back in high school. With the advent of the internet new ways are being constantly developed to better convey the right information to the right audience. Blogger for instance has hundreds of gadgets to use in order to customize a page, everything from simple text boxes, to games, videos, and news feeds.

7) Make your page yours. By playing around with the HTML templates a little bit, it is possible to change just about every visible page element, widen the display area, move the sidebar over, change the main heading, etc.

8) Get your name out there. There is no shame in putting links out on Facebook, Twitter, or by simple word of mouth. Even if people don't come out and say they will check out your blog, at least you plant that seed in their mind. By reading this rule, I hope you see my point.

9) Don't get bogged down with detail. Get your ideas out in the open while they are still fresh and exciting, then worry about polishing them when you have a solid base established. The reason my early blog failed so often was because I spent to much time trying to put in counters and insignificant stuff (at least for a beginners blog), that I lost interest in the content.

I will wrap it up with a final thought. The challenging thing about blogs is they are an unfamiliar concept of our notion of idea sharing. Their not like journals with which one keeps their personal feelings (though they can be). Yet they are not elegant websites meant to draw in hordes of traffic from all over the world (though they can be that too). Perhaps a way to look at blogs is not like a medium to share ideas at all, but as an underlying set of tools and concepts meant to serve a purpose to the author whether it be practical, commercial, or anything in between.