Before Darren Rowse found success at ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School, he was a beginner, and that means figuring out how to overcome those bumps in the road.
Beginners and those struggling with their own blogs may face different challenges than Rowse did, but can take heart from this article where he explains what issues he faced and the steps he took to come out a winner.
1. Technical Know How
When I started blogging I was using the web for email and occasional research for essays for the study I was doing. I’d used IRC chat but had never created a web page, had never ‘coded’ anything, had no understanding of how to register a domain or get a site on a server and had no ability when it came to designing a blog.
As a result I made a lot of mistakes in those early years with poor choices of blogging platforms, domain names etc.
The big lessons for me in this was that while there was a lot I didn’t know about blogging and there was always something to learn (and there still is 10 years later) you really don’t need to know it all at once.
Start simple and grow your knowledge and skills as you need them – and as you’re able you might also like to look at partnering with others or outsourcing to people who complement your skill set.
2. Fear of Looking Stupid
As a result of #1 one of the earliest challenges that could have held me back was looking stupid. I have distinct memories in the first few months of blogging where I would compare my very poorly designed and badly written blog (at least that’s what I saw) with other bloggers who seemed to know what they were doing – I remember wondering if people were reading purely for a laugh.
Luckily I got past this fear and kept working on developing my blogging voice and skill set and in time the fear subsided.
I think the other key for me in overcoming this fear was to focus my energies on creating content with my blog that attempted to solve tangible problems that I knew people had. I think by taking this constructive approach you create a useful blog that is pretty difficult to critique.
Full story at ProBlogger.
Everyone starts out as a beginner in blogging.
Photo credit: Fotolia