"I'm scared to start my blog!"
This is a cry I am hearing from many clients lately.
There are two groups of people who fear blogging: those who have no desire to blog but feel they are supposed to, and those who are dying to blog but are too afraid of getting it wrong to get started.
This post is for the second group. For the first group, I have been getting them on twitter, where they all seem to be quite happy and connecting well with those they want to reach.
But now... onto the journey it takes to become a blogger.
It does not happen overnight. This is my first post, written nearly three years ago. Really. That's all I had to say the first time out. No pictures, no branding, no tagline. Just a scared lady about to make a big move somewhere new. Here's how I went from there to here.
image: DavidErickson
Blogging is not publishing in the traditional sense. It is a malleable medium. You can publish, look at a post, go back and correct spelling and grammar and hit publish again. I do this all the time. It might even happen with this post.
Topics evolve, preferences change, and what you want to say changes. This can be because of comments you are getting, comments you aren't getting, or because of who you are now versus last week or last month or last year.
I remember the terror that came with hitting publish that first time. There were so many menus in the blog interface and I didn't have a clue about what any of them meant. I didn't know how to add pictures, video, podcast, nothing. I just wanted to communicate, and so a programmer I was dating at the time gave me some great advice: "Why don't you just start?"
This is what I tell my clients who want to blog: just blog! Much like the Nike slogan, blogging is one of the many things out there best learned by doing. The bummer of the way this whole thing works is that when you read archives here, you don't see the layout as it was before. I have had a various points a plain text-only typepad basic banner, a banner I made myself in photoshop, and then a professionally designed one to match my site, and shortly all of this will change again as Remabulous continues to expand and grow.
It would not have been useful to try to start with a podcast and a vlog and professional design. When I started, I didn't even know what it was I wanted to say. Blogging helped me discover this. It can help you too, if you give it tha chance.
This is a medium that shouldn't be over-planned. Its beauty is its intimacy and its ability to change and share someone's true voice at that moment.
It's funny, re-reading that first post mentioned above made me a bit nostalgic. I miss that part of me that was more off the cuff and who was simply trying to speak her truth in a big scary world. In many ways, that hasn't changed, for all the technical whiz-bang I can now throw at any of the three sites I work on now.
So, if you feel pulled to blog, blog. Sign up. Try blogger if you want something free. Try typepad, the service I currently use or WordPress if you want more control over the design- something I have always valued.
Write that first post. And don't judge what it is. Love your words, a creative writing teacher of mine used to say. I would hold that here. And one day you may look back on a post you remembered as a silly start and realize you had something to say then, too.
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