Birth of a Blog: Conception. Otherwise Known as: How To Start a Blog.

Birth of a Blog: Conception. Otherwise Known as: How To Start a Blog.

A discussion of the new blog has to begin with the old blog, which has now gone to the great blogosphere in the sky. The old blog died because I didn’t love it and I didn’t take care of it. I started it because I kept reading advice that said my business needed a blog. I turned around and wrote highly personal, sometimes controversial things on it. It wasn’t that the posts were inappropriate for publication, but they weren’t right for a business blog, and I knew it. Still, everyone had said, “be you”, “be engaging”, “be passionate.” I tried to be all that, but it just wasn’t right.

I now question the original advice to even have a blog associated with my business–I never read brand blogs, do you?–and have learned to inspect every piece of advice carefully. Sometimes the people giving the advice might have used it to go down a totally different path than the one I seek.

This is the first in a series of posts about the birth of my new blog, due to launch in June 2014. I think I’ve learned a lot, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. Little of it will be the technical knowledge that is critical to running a blog. I’m weak in that area. Still, I hope to give you some practical advice.

So here’s how the new blog came about: the old one was dying. I knew it was dying, and then, suddenly, I stopped writing. I hated writing for it. I hated that weekly burden. I hated the feeling that no one was reading it. [This turned out not to be true, though.] So I stopped.

However, I love writing itself, and I do hope to earn an income from it. So this is what I did:

Got Advice. I told a friend of mine about my frustrations with the old blog, and she encouraged me to start a new one and asked provocative questions to help me.

Picked a specific topic I was truly passionate and knowledgeable about. I have a lot to say about it; on the other hand, it is something of a finite nature that will have a natural stopping point if I want it to, so I don’t need to feel like it’s a lifetime commitment.

Picked a topic that can help enrich the lives of others. I want to genuinely add value to people’s lives.

Brainstormed post topics, resources, even social media posts. It became tedious to come up with new material on the old blog; this time I want to start with a huge amount of material ready to go. I hope this will ensure that I mostly write when I actually have something to say, not just to keep up with a posting schedule. I actually can’t wait to start putting some of this stuff on the blog calendar.

Picked a start date. I gave myself three months or so. It was a little arbitrary, but hopefully it will be just enough time to build some material, build some excitement, and build my website.

In the next post, I’ll talk about some of my initial promotion and research.

How many of you have had more than one blog? What did you learn after your first try?

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