Notes for New Bloggers
I was remembering what it was like to be a brand new blogger, and the things that people told me and the things I wish I’d been told. Thusly, here are five things I was most ambivalent about at the beginning and advice regarding them.
1. You may be wondering how much of yourself you can reveal on your blog. The answer to that depends on you, and you should respect your boundaries. If you want to be anonymous, be anonymous. If you want to be pseudonymous, be pseudonymous. If you want to be full identity, then go with that. Do what makes you feel most comfortable, because if you’re not comfortable with your space then you won’t keep blogging.
1a. Identity doesn’t come overnight. It will continue to develop as you go along, and will be partly dependent on pragmatic things, like how much you want to be able to blog about private aspects of your life.
2. The best blogs are smart and funny and true. However, you shouldn’t feel like you can’t post unless you have something smart and funny to say. Something true is quite good enough, and most days that’s the best any of us can hope for. And true isn’t as lofty as it sounds. Sometimes true is something that you noticed in the course of your mundane little day. Sometimes something true is just a link to something else that made you laugh or cry or think.
2a. Even the bloggers you think are always smart don’t necessarily think of themselves that way. I once wrote to a blogger whose intellect is universally respected in order to get permission for a quote I was using in a publication. He said, "Did it sound smart? It didn’t come from one of my stupid posts, did it?" This from a man who seriously has no stupid posts.
3. Mine the network. Work your blogroll, link within your posts, and keep up on your comments and trackbacks. Put a site meter on there so you know who’s coming to see you. Your blog will be better, your life will be richer, and your social circle will be wider. Eventually.
3a. Don’t worry if you’re writing to an audience of six people, four of whom are related to you. Do a good job for those six people. Keep linking out to others, keep commenting elsewhere. Eventually, they will come. But for most of us, building traffic takes time.
4. Make a commitment to a rhythm. Assign yourself to write every day for two months. Or to post more often than not - say, four days out of every seven - for two months. It takes awhile to build up the habit, to learn to sit down and see what happens even on the days you don’t think you have anything to say. After two months, take stock and see if this is the right pace for you. Alter accordingly.
4a. If, after keeping your rhythm up for a goodly stretch (say, six months or a year), you find that you need a break, take one. Hiatuses are not necessarily bad things, and are much better than forcing yourself to blog until you absolutely hate it and abandon it altogether.
5. Make your blog what you want it to be, not what you think it should be. This is more difficult if you’re blogging to fulfill class assignments. Still there’s nothing that says you can’t intersperse those required reading responses with photos or essays or poems or whatever else your little heart desires. Make your blog your space.
5a. Worry about design as much or as little as you feel like. That starter template you’ve got up may be exactly what you need now - a blank, generic space, ready to bear the imprint of your immortal words. Or you may need to show off your CSS chops and customize everything within an inch of its life. You can even pay someone else to do it for you. But you are obligated to none of those options.
Blogging is a process, and how you feel about all these issues will change as you go along. That's part of the beauty of it - you end up with a record of your shifting self.
Comments
krista, thank you, thank you, thank you for consolidating this in such a handy & reassuring little list! we're having all of these wide-bloomed theoretical conversations-about-implications over in 711, and while most of these suggestions are probably buried as little nuggets in there somewhere, a together-list--especially one vetted by the actual experiences of a real-live for-a-while-now blogger--is very valuable as a resource. and also it's a little like a virtual "c'mon, kids, you can do it!" hug. sometimes we need those.
Posted by: tyra | February 7, 2005 10:02 AM
Great! It was certainly meant as a very long-armed, not-creepy hug from a stranger. Although I already feel less distanced from you folks. All of you had better come to C’s so I can meet you IRL!
Posted by: Krista | February 7, 2005 11:34 AM
This is smart and funny. It makes me think back to the time when I first started blogging and worried about whether or not I had anything important enough to blog about. I finally resigned myself to blog about whatever the heck I wanted to (to a certain extent). I have tried to keep certain things to myself. I am sure that everyone doesn't want to know exactly how I feel about certain things, or maybe it's just that I reserve certain things for friends so that I totally flush my career down the toilet!! :-)
Posted by: dr. b. | February 7, 2005 12:16 PM