To continue my series about Blogging for Money – The Basics, I want to talk about knowledge. Time, Work, and Knowledge are the keys to making a blog successful.
If you live in the USA, then you went to school for 12 years or so, then off to college for 2-10 years. Hopefully you got a degree, otherwise you got screwed like a lot of other students have been over the years. In that time you learned a lot. You obtained the skills to go forth into a career and to work for someone else the rest of your life until they kick you out once you get to old.
What did you really learn in college? You learned a lot about the subject of your major, and you learned to work for someone else, probably in one of those damn class groups. Do you see the problem? You learned a subject and how to work for someone. That is all you learned.
When it comes to being self employed, going your own way, thinking outside of the box, being creative, being an independent thinker, you didn’t get that education. You also didn’t get taught much on how to educate yourself once you leave college. Knowledge is a lifetime adventure, we are always getting an education even if we are not in school. Like in learning how to do anything, learning to blog and be a blogger takes time. It actually has a learning curve to it, and you can’t avoid it. Well, you can if you can plug yourself in and download the knowledge like they did in “The Matrix”.
The point is, to become a professional successful blogger like John Chow or Darren Rowse, you have to learn all the same things they did about blogging. They didn’t know much when they started either. It doesn’t stop there though, you will be learning the rest of your life. You already do now with technology as it changes all the time. Blogging is the same way.
So now that I showed you how to make time to blog even working a 40 hour a week job. Showed you how much work blogging really is in the real world. Now I just told you that you will be educating yourself about blogging the rest of your life. Is this a bad thing though? NO! While some people would think so, to do this right, you have to look at all of this as fun. Learning and educating yourself in new things is fun. If you see blogging as a chore then you will give up quickly. That is the problem with most bloggers, they give up because they can’t make time, didn’t realize it was actually work, or hated learning things.
How much knowledge do you need to begin blogging? The amount you have now. Everyone starts somewhere. Yes, you have a lot of work ahead of you but it will be worth it.
The key to planning your blogging is to take one thing at a time. Here is a list in the order I do them when I start up a typical website this will help you get going.
- Decide the topic of the website
- Ask myself if the topic is something I really enjoy
- If I didn’t say “yes” to step 2, then I pick another topic and start again.
- Create a domain name, one that isn’t taken. I usually make a list of possible names.
- Setup up web hosting. Setup is kind of the wrong word, actually just pick the web host and pay them to set up the account. If creating a blog I make sure they have “WordPress”.
- Then I get WordPress installed.
- After WordPress is installed I log into the website and start selecting my settings and then I can write an “About Me” page and write the first post.
- Over the course of days I do a few steps at a time to the website, like design, templates, and so forth.
It takes a day to setup “WordPress” on a website. After that it is just a matter of taking it one step at a time.
No, I didn’t forget about the topic or blogging in general. You picked a topic for your blog because it is a subject you like, so you must already know something about it. Since you already enjoy the topic you won’t mind reading everything you find on the topic, you want to become an expert in the topic.
While you are at it, read everything you can find on blogging. Even if you don’t fully understand it, read it anyway. Once you have it in your head, it will come back out later once you learn enough to completely understand it. Look at blogs on blogging, books on blogging, and talk to bloggers. There are a lot of websites out there that are on the subject of being a better blogger, as time goes by you will find most of them I’m sure.
While all of this seems overwhelming it isn’t as bad as it might sound. Each blogger on the net has went through the same blogging learning curve. We also continue to learn because of software updates, new websites, new software, and changes in technology. You never stop learning and if you can’t find the answer ask someone. A lot of bloggers on the net will answer questions.
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