What Would You Do Different?
December 9, 2008 by BloggerNewbie
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“What Would You Do Different?”
I started a series a couple of weeks ago called Question of the Week? Vote in our Poll! I asked you what questions you would like to see debated in this series.
Rachel from Averagegal.com asked “In hindsight, what would you have done differently when starting your first blog?” Rachel is no “average gal”. She is a forward thinking young lady as well as very ambitious. Rachel has, I believe, three blogs. She is always adding or changing something at AverageGal.com. Keeping your blog fresh and new will keep people coming back looking for something different.
I couldn’t come up with a poll type question so I decided to just throw the question out for discussion.
What would you have done differently when starting your first blog?
My blog is only a little over six months old so I don’t have a great length of time to review. I had my brick and mortar business for 20 years so I had an abundance of experiences to review. I have often contemplated the “what I 
would have done differently” in regards to raising my children. In retrospect, with both of these examples there is a significant amount of time to be able to discuss lessons learned. Once you see the outcome of your actions it is always easy to have 20/20 in hindsight. Now both of those subjects could each be a book on their own!
Looking back over the last few months I would say one mistake I made would have been joining too many social networks too soon. If you can’t participate in the social network with good faith then you shouldn’t be there. If you are there for business purposes only, then you should make that clear. I don’t think you will get too far but you should be upfront about your intentions.
Another observation is in reference to monetizing the blog. It is not very productive to have countless sources of advertising. In hindsight, I would have taken a closer look at advertising and narrowed them down and chosen just a few.
So now over to you – “In hindsight, what would you have done differently when starting your first blog?”
Toodles – Blog Happy!
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“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes…”
- Oscar Wilde
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I think I would find a blogging buddy (I kind of still need one). I knew nothing about blogging or Wordpress for that matter. Having a buddy would have probably spared me of some headaches.
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Now that you have told your readers and fellow bloggers what you would have done different blogging, you need to also tell you readers and fellow bloggers what you would have done different raising your children! I’m curious to know now! So i should be looking for that blog in the future?! Or are you going to write a book on it? I’m looking forward to what you have to say…
Carla,
I live in such a rural area I am lucky to find a computer geek such as myself! Blogs won’t be a common household word around here for another 10 years! I have found over the years that jumping right in is the best way to learn – the hard way of course. Do you think you will ever forget some of the lessons you learned that were such a struggle?
Courtney,
Are you SURE you want me to write that post? And as you well know it certainly could be a book! Well I have always told you to be careful what you ask for. Check back next week young lady.
I really appreciate the kind words Dee! I do have three blogs, which I try to update as frequently as my schedule allows. (2 and 3 year olds can be a little demanding at times – lol) I just hope that I’m able to live up to everyone’s expectations
Thanks for the link as well!
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Hi Rachel;
You do a great job and your expectations are all you need to live up to. They are probably higher than anyone else’s anyway! I have a two yr old grandson and he is a one man wrecking machine so I am sure both your babies keep you busy!
I guess I would have had more of a plan. I just started doing it. Didn’t think about a niche or making money or anything like that. But then I started it as therapy so maybe I did it just how I needed to.
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Before I started my current blog I was blogging from my name as the domain. I finally realised that if I ever wanted to sell my blog I’d need to sell my name which I didn’t want to do.
So I started again.
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Kim,
It’s hard to have a plan if you don’t know what you are getting yourself into. I was SO anxious to get started but I forced myself to read Darren’s ProBlogger book first. It was great but I think only experience can teach me! I’ll have to go back and read ProBlogger again. I am sure I will be nodding my head a lot more this time around.
Tom,
I hope you didn’t have your other blog too too long cause it takes so much work to build up even a little ranking! Blogging is certainly a learning experience isn’t it?
I’ve been blogging publicly for over a year an a half, and I’ve learned several lessons in that time:
- Get a plan. Like Kim commented about above, it’s so tempting to just jump right in (after all, the ideas and passion are flowing!); however, after a little bit of time, that starts to dwindle, and you’re left wondering where to go next. My first blog was about mental health. The company hired me to write a blog about mental health, and so that’s what I did. Yet, as time went on, I realized that mental health is a huge subject, perhaps too huge for one blog, and there are so many niches within the niche of mental health. I didn’t plan properly, nor did the company. (And, as far as plans are concerned, bloggers need overall grand-scheme-of-things plans, as well as week-to-week plans – ‘m still trying to perfect the art – or science – of keeping an editorial-type calendar for myself!).
- Don’t take anything personally. Unless someone flat out says, “That Alicia over at Celebrity Psychings is stupid,” I try not to take anything someone says personally. People have their own opinions, and if they don’t like what I write, then, they just don’t like it.
- NEVER hit the “publish” button immediately, and especially not if you wrote the post first thing in the morning or the last thing at night. (I’m still learning this, actually, ha.) There’ve been times when I’ve gone back and looked at posts and thought, what on Earth was I thinking? Things we write seem great as we’re writing them, but oftentimes once we let the passion of the post-writing cool down and go back and review the post, we find things we want to rephrase, clarify, delete altogether, etc.
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Alica:
Lots of great advice. I think the duties of a blogger as well as the information available are both so overwhelming that if you don’t have some sort of plan to somewhat follow, then you are going to get to the same place I get when I am on my treadmill – nowhere!
How many blogs do you write for now? I can’t imagine more than one at this point! If I could do it full time,(what a dream) I would love to do more than one.
Right now I’m just doing one blog, and it’s fairly new (I wrote a blog for b5media for a long time, then moved on to a new one – couldn’t really keep them both at the same time because the subject matter overlaps and I’d probably end up hating that, ha). I think I could probably take on one more, but, it takes time and dedication to make just one blog successful, so, two blogs and work would be IT, ha. Doing it full time would be awesome – I know a few people who do, and one that recently started. Blogging is such an addiction, haha.
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I don’t think I could handle more than one blog right now either. Maybe after this one takes off. I don’t personally know anyone who blogs. Blogging is so popular but not in my area, it takes us at least 10 years to catch up with the rest of the world.