PureBlogging

How did you move from your first steps as a blogger to being the blogger you are today? All the bloggers I talk to seem to have gone through the same steps in moving from blogging newbies to experienced bloggers. Here are the steps I think many bloggers take in their evolution.

Step 1: What’s A Blog And Why Should I Get One?

I can illustrate this stage from my own experience. I started blogging in 2005. I’d decided to go freelance, had set up a site and had read that a blog was a good way to drive traffic, so I set one up on my site. I had no idea what I was doing, other than trying to post regularly. At the same time, I did what many other new bloggers do – I joined a site where the blog was all set up and all I had to do was post. I think that’s why many people start with Blogger, because they can get set up in minutes and don’t have to mess about under the hood unless they want to. The same goes for Wordpress.com blogs.

Step 2: Beyond The Basics

For me, the second step was to move away from the defaults on my blogs. In Blogger, that meant changing themes and finding out how to add interesting items such as tag clouds that would make the blog much easier to use. In Wordpress, that meant investigating new themes and plugins, something I still do a lot of today. (What can I say, I love gadgets!) This is often the point at which some people decide to move away from blog services to getting their own domain. The reason to do this is the freedom it gives you to change your blog easily in any way you want, which is important when it comes to the next step.

Step 3:  Creating An Identity

By the time you’ve been blogging for a while, you get more comfortable dropping by other blogs and leaving comments, and soon you begin to get noticed. Shock, horror – other people leave comments on your blog too, and the resulting conversation begins to create your online personality. You’re free to be anyone you want to be. When I blog, I’m me. I don’t always reveal every detail about my life, but what I do reveal is true. There are lots of other bloggers with recognisable online personas and it doesn’t take long to develop an identity and a following.

Step 4: You Mean, I Can Make Money With This?

The bloggers I have spoken to (and I admit there might be a bias because most of us are writers) all started blogs for traffic building or profile raising. It wasn’t till they’d been blogging for a while that they realised that there were other advantages to blogging. The ability to make money from Adsense, affiliate products and ad sales was a revelation, and many of us started monetizing wildly, often with little idea what we were doing. (As an aside, it’s much easier to make money if you are blogging about blogging, technology, entertainment or health. Other than that you have to have a LOT of traffic on a writing site to make anything decent. I do ok with my site, but my friend who has a writing site that gets 100,000 visitors a month is really doing well.)

Step 5: I’ve Got To Post About This

Step five is the step that inspired this whole post, leading me to think how far I’ve come in the last three years. I was sitting in a plane the other day, reading through the in-flight magazine to choose my movie. All of a sudden I noticed that there were no seat back videos or any other kind, so what was the point of advertising movies. I immediately thought what a wonderful piece that would make for a travel blog. Three years on, I often think about events in terms of how to convey them to blog readers.

How have you evolved as a blogger since you started blogging?

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