Beginner’s Blog

I’ve had an idea about this blog for more then a week now. Bought the domain (nice one, huh?:). Installed Wordpress, found a theme that I like – Blix- and stopped. Until yesterday, when I found this great post about Procrastination on Performancing. It hit me on my head - “Just go and do it!”.

In the first post I want to describe my goals and motives of starting the Beginner’s blog. I thought about how to structure the first article for a while. There are lots of thoughts buzzing in my head right now, and it’s difficult to put all of them into one article. The easiest thing will be, if someone asked me a bunch of questions and I tried to answer them the best I can. Since there’s no one to do that, I will do the interview with myself. Here we go:

So, why did you start blogging?

I am fascinated with IT, Internet business, the possibilities it provides and wanted to become more actively involved with that. I’ve been reading various blogs since 2001. I thought about blogging in 2002. I even opened a Blogger account and started a blog. However, it never got past the first couple of posts.

Why?

I did not feel that I had anything interesting to say. I was not sure, what topics should I focus on. There always seemed to be lots of smarter people, with better writing skills, more knowledge and experience about the things I wanted to write. So what can I add to the conversation? The things that I knew well (like the field I work in) seemed boring and not interesting to potential readers. You lose motivation pretty quickly in a situation like this.

And now it’s different?

Yes. Late last year I stumbled on a blog called College Startup which led me to a number of other blogs about blogging. Blogs like ProBlogger by Darren Rowse, MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle by Eric Giguere, Performacing, and a few others. I’ve read about how people developed their blogging careers, their great advice to novice blogger wannabes, do’s and don’ts of blogging, blog monetization capabilities, etc. What I learned from them is that if you have passion and commitment, can write and have common sense, you can do it. And you can earn some money from it. Or, if you are good, you can even have a pretty good life from blogging. Also, you really can’t lose. Even if you fail – it’s a good learning experience and doesn’t cost you much.

So, with all this knew knowledge and the urge to do something, that’s been there for years, how could I NOT start blogging? Well, I just went and launched my blog on Dec. 31, 2005.

Wait a minute! You launched your blog in December? But this is your first post and it’s Jan. 25^th?

Yep. This is not my first blog. I launched my first blog – Blogdotes - last year. (It’s was the last day of 2005, but I can still brag that I started blogging in 2005. Smart, eh? ;). Blogdotes is the humor blog, where I post jokes and funny stories that I hear or find on the Net.

Hmm…You had a blog for only a month. Why start another? Isn’t it too much too fast?

Well, maybe. But I don’t really feel that way. With this blog I want to have a place where I can write down my blogging experiences from the very beginning and in (almost) real time.

The thing is, that when you read the articles about the start of successful blogging carriers, it all seems so easy. Even if they say that it’s hard, it takes persistence and time, you don’t truly feel that way. You think that you will launch your blog, post daily, submit some comments and trackbacks to other blogs, exchange some links and Voila! The readers will come pouring in. Well, they won’t. At least, if you are not some sort of celebrity or don’t have some truly exceptional content. And most of us don’t.

You can’t really feel the daily frustrations, ups and downs of a blogger wannabe in these articles. Waiting for the first visitor to come in, waiting for the first cents of earnings from AdSense, the joy of the first hit from a search engine, etc. You can find some traces of that, but most of it is probably already forgotten by the authors. So I wanted to leave some record of that for myself and (hopefully) others to see. And where’s a better place for that, then in a blog?

So, you basically want to keep the record for yourself?

Partly. I also hope, that this might be useful to other beginners. And, maybe, provide some amusement for experienced bloggers. I truly want this blog to attract audience over time. Then it can also provide some promotion to my other blogs. Self promotion angle is an important part of Beginner’s blog. But learning/recording part is equally important.

When you work on a project passionately, you tend to forget things over time. You forget some smart things that you did, and you certainly forget a lot of stupid things you did in the beginning. At least I know I do. It’s been less then a month and I already forgot some. E.g. during the first week I submitted my blog to a number of directories, requested link exchange from a number of sites, purchased some credits on BlogExplosion, did some other things and now I can’t recall them all. So I can not really say how my first “promotion campaign” has worked.

Therefore, I plan to put my daily experiences here, on this blog. This will surely help me to remember and track the things I did. And, I hope, it will be a fun reading for me after one year. To see how inexperienced and naïve I’ve been.

It will also make me more disciplined in my daily efforts. If I’m going to put them for all the world to see, I have to be more reflective. I have to think carefully, write down my reasons and expectations. Then, after a while, I have to look and evaluate the results. I hope this will provide me with enough posting material to keep this blog going.

Ok. Now I can understand you motives. How your other blog…

I’m sorry. It already took more then two hours for me to get to this point. And it will take at least another hour to polish and post this interview to my blog. I feel pretty exhausted right now, and I still have some of my day job things to attend. Could we continue this tomorrow?

See you tomorrow…

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