What Motivated You To Start Blogging?
36 Comments August 2, 2007 / Posted in Blog Development
I would like to take a moment here to ask you think back to what motivated you to start blogging? When and where were you when you made that decision?
I am doing a little bit of market research to find out how most people first became exposed to blogs, what motivated them to start, and what would have made their experience better. My business partners, Matt, Josh and I are working on a new product and service aimed at helping both new and experienced bloggers.
Anyone who decides to write at least a 250-word response to me, either via comment or email, I will link to your response and blog URL (read: get some PR 5 Google juice) in a post next week.
Some of the questions I would like you to consider are:
- How did you first find out about blogging?
- Where did you first learn about blogging?
- Who or what motivated you to start blogging?
- What do you wish you had known then that you know now?
Here is an example response from me about why I started blogging…
Why I Started Blogging
I have said many times before that I started blogging in order to meet and connect with similarly motivated people. I also started blogging in order to expand my knowledge of Internet business and to attract new clients to my web design business.
The first blog I ever discovered was only last November. I was reading Digg when I saw an article written by John Chow about how to build a tech review business.
One thing that I wish I had access to when I first started blogging was a guide about the new rules of online media. “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” by David Meerman Scott changed my outlook of how to best market my blog, brand and businesses on the Internet.
Well, I hope that some of you will choose to respond to this mini-meme. Like I said, if you do, I will link to your response and URL next week in a followup post. Feel free to answer just one or all of those questions. I look forward to hearing your responses.
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Matt Blancarte
COO of UBD
Josh Mullineaux
CMO of UBD
honestly, i saw john chow on the lab with leo, and if that guy can do it why cant i? that basically why so my main goal is to provide quality to my readers but second goal, to prove i can out blog chow!
I just kept blogging on things that I liked. I’ve been doing this for over 20 months now.
Nate - I’ve a doubt. How do you ‘write things’ on the image? This one has a transparent black bar. Can you explain me how to do or point to other resource from where I can learn ?
20 months? Is that all?
Been blogging for 5 years
I have been in the top 500 blogs on technorati (when there were only 750 blogs on there, but I digress).
Rhys -
‘The best time to start blogging is last year. The second best time is today’ - some wise blogger.
If I applied, this when I started blogging, I guess it made sense.
I still believe that we need to slog for almost 3-4 years to leave a mark…
Ive been blogging for a year and a half and i think it was the SEO forum i joined telling me how much good it would do for my website and SEO efforts
The very first blog I read was of Steve Pavlina and let’s face it. I was impressed with his brutal honesty. Slowly, I started reading others and then decided, let me get my own.
I’ve blogging only for the last 6 months, but it has been good.
I wish I had started with Wordpress.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t having a go or anything. Congratulations for sticking out so long
And John Chow has only been going for a year, Problogger has been for 2 years or so, so who knows what sort of mark they will leave in 4 years of blogging!
Bout the only thing I’ve got over them is experience (in terms of keeping going for a year or so!)
I first encountered a blog in early 2001 when Google led me to someone who wrote about my first book. She interchanged thoughts about my book with thoughts about her cats. Weird, I thought.
I started my own blog in 2004 because my email newsletter was a pain in the butt to create and because the newsletter was a closed group with no Google play. It was a slow start - I only heard the sounds of crickets chirping after my first posts and several times I almost gave up.
Three years later, my blog is my best marketing tool. It has allowed me to build a fun (and lucrative) platform and has delivered dozens of paid speaking gigs, dozens of opportunities to be quoted in the media and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
First blogs were non commercial sharing inspirational articles e.t.c. Then I set up blogs with the objective of earning money. Still spend about 50% of time on non commercial blogs
If you have Photoshop, look for help online.
I use GIMP because it is free. There are a few tutorials, and some documentation. In GIMP, you just create layers, and you can change the opacity of the layer. He probably just made a black layer, made it transparent, then dropped in on the picture. After that, add the text and you are good to go.
At least that is how I would do it with GIMP.
I started back in Jan of this year when I used to visit My Money Blog everyday. He wrote about money (obviously), but the one thing he loved about his blog was that it kept him accountable. Who would take money advice from someone who couldn’t keep their finances in order? I started my own money blog to keep myself accountable.
I sold that blog because I ran out of topics. I realized I did not know a lot about money, and I was not good with money. But I did realize I like blogging. So I switched over to something I did like, Web Development and the Internet.
I’ve known blogs for a long time, like 7 years ago. Back then they were nothing more than teenage diaries, pink pages full of nothing useful. As people realized that they could use this publishing concept of daily entries to more interesting things, blogs got interesting: journalists, technology fans, music fans, I began to see blogs spawn in every subject. Still, there was this impression that it was a teenager thing.
Back in 2001 I helped create a forum on the stock marketing, which ended up begin the biggest in the country. In the beggining we allowed for personal posts, so everyone could write about whatever they felt like (except during the business hours). It worked like a collective blog. I wrote a lot there. As the site grew bigger, we felt it was not appropriate to allow for these posts anymore. So I was left without a place to write. But it would take me another couple of years until I found out some interesting blogs, both in Portuguese and in English. I built an RSS feed list, and through it, discovered John Chow. I read all posts in his blog and they motivated me to get started.
I’ve been blogging for 4 months. The reason I blog is to speak (or write) my mind on several areas of interest: music, politics, games and technology. I also like to blog about blogging itself and to help new bloggers like me. I plan to monetize once I get the traffic.
I don’t think there’s something I wish I knew before, I only wish I had begun earlier.
I think your follow up article next week is going to be a very interesting read. The internet is such a varied place that could inspire someone to blog in a infinite number of ways. I look forward to hearing a few of the stories.
Of course, for some blog, it gets popular fast. For Om Malik, it took 5 years and Micheal Arrington used to work for 16 hours a day for some 3-4 years.
Motivation to Start Blogging
Love your work, thanks for the offer. I’m three-months strong into my blog and my readership is up to 100.
http://www.snarkybehavior.com
My motivation to start blogging came from two major sources:
1. High School English Teacher: I was a snarky journalist for our high-school paper and she appreciated and encouraged my voice and style. She really harped on me that I should pursue writing professionally in college and beyond, but I never committed because I couldn’t conceive a safety net for failure. The blog lets me write and publish on my own terms, and still have a career and be a student.
2. Ezra Klein: I don’t know him personally, but we went to the same high school and college, and has made quite a name for himself at The American Prospect. The fact that he is a contemporary with such a similar background as my own makes my vision of blogging success much more accessible.
3. Rohitsrealm.com : A good friend from high-school really sold me on the idea of the blog as a public journal that records your development in thought and growth as a person. Most of our readers are young professionals killing time at work so it’s easy to conceive our blog posts as happy hour conversations amongst friends.
Even if I’m not successful as a blogger, or it damages my career professionally in some fashion, I feel like the value added by the excitement it has generated amongst my friends has been totally worth it.
I started blogging in August 2006 as a lark. I owned the domain name of my full name, but was not using it - so I threw up a Wordpress blog and a horrid free theme and started blogging about being a mompreneur. I used it mostly as a cheap replacement for therapy. I was shocked that just after a few posts, I was indexed by google, was asked to by a syndicated columnist on a great website, and was a pretty high search results for some of my keywords. Wow! But after 3 posts a week for a while, I dropped off and was just posting randomly. It was too hard to keep up, and I was not inspired.
I really started up again in May 2007, relaunched in June with a new theme and purpose, and started a major social networking and blog networking campaign — with great results. I’m posting just about every day, and get more unique visitors on my blog than my business webpage.
What do I wish I would have known then?
(1) You don’t have to write an big article for every post.
(2) You can have guest posts, book reviews, blog reviews, “helpful link” posts, and video.
(3) Google loves blogs.
(4) Promoting a blog take time, but is not very expensive.
(5) Bloggers love to read other blogs.
(6) Bloggers love social networking.
(7) Getting bloggers to read your blog is the first step in getting more traffic.
(8) Easiest way to get a blogger to read your blog is to read their blog, make good comments, link to them, and find them on social networking sites (like MyBlogLog).
(9) Google Reader is a fast and easy way to read dozens of blog RSS feed every day.
(10) Give people a bunch of easy ways to sign up for your RSS feed. And don’t call them all RSS feed because some people don’t know what that means.
(11) A blog is the easiest way to have a website that changes all the time, and is a conversation with your target audience. Must faster and easier than learning CSS or paying a webmaster.
(12) People love to see their own picture (MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, BUMPzee).
(13) Giving first (links, reviews, purchases, thank you’s) works.
Thanks!
Elizabeth
I knew about blogging a long while back, but thought of it as just a bunch of people making personal diaries. Then I guess last year I started noticing more and more links to blogs and blog reactions when I was reading news sites. I started to realize it was a bit more than just personal diaries.
My first blog was (and still is) just to let friends and family stay updated on what I’m up to. However, my next blog was motivated by an idea for a website which I realized could be best delivered through a blog. Now I see it as a kind of public journal.
In terms of more serious blogging, I learned about it at Steve Pavlina.com and then some other blogging sites, trying to gather the various bits of information I needed.
I wish had known: wordpress was better than blogger, how to do some basic customizations, how to write good content, about motivation, how to market a blog, how to build initial traffic.
Hey guys, I wanted to thank everyone real quick who has chosen to participate in this interesting conversation.. There is certainly a lot of great information in here and it has been interesting to hear your initial experiences of blogging, so far. Thanks so much for all of your feedback!
I started out with websites back in 1999 when I was bored and saw a bunch of people making websites on geocities. My site sort of just evolved into a blog when I started posting updates and when my boyfriend at the time left for the navy, my updates became much more frequent. Then I discovered B2 software and my blog morphed into what it is today. I wasn’t initally motivated or inspired by anyone but I find inspiration to keep on writing in blogs like this one. The only thing I wish I knew then sort of relates to blogging - I wish I had the insight to buy a bunch of domains that I see are selling for ridiculous amounts of money now.
My first exposure to blogging came in what I’m guessing is an unusual way. I wasn’t out looking for content and stumbled upon (no pun intended) somebody’s material, but got connected to the corporate blogging experience at my job at HP almost 3 years ago. If anybody is familiar with that platform (http://hp.com/blogs), it semi-controversially does not allow anonymous comments. At the time, I was working for a group that provided assistance synchronizing sites with our HP-wide authentication solution and got exposed to what blogging is about as our externally facing solution was taking shape.
Two promotions later, oddly, I’m now in charge of it.
Parallel to that, I began working on a book proposal. In 14 years of HP, I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with hundreds of engineers in a variety of disciplines from all over the world. What I noticed over time was that the best ones had the same traits and that none of these traits had anything to do with technical skill. Things like the ability to accurately estimate the duration of tasks on a schedule during planning phases of a project or being able to explain extremely complex topics to executives and marketing people with non-technical backgrounds.
My first attempt at submitting my proposal to publishers didn’t get me anywhere, so I decided to take a grass-roots approach and convert the material into blog entries. I started by converting 3 of the 5 chapters I’d written into a series of posts and brainstormed a set of smaller article topics so that I had about a months worth of material written before I put my first original post on my site. 6 months later, I’m still enjoying it and have benefited from the connections I’ve made in unexpected ways.
Things I know now that I wish I knew then:
- Writing the articles is half the battle. If you don’t have a good marketing plan for your material, you’re just writing for yourself and your mom.
- Get a good layout as early as possible. I went through weeks of trial and error before I found something that was simple and clean. By that time, plenty of people visited and didn’t stay, meaning I missed out on retention through my own stupidity and impatience.
- Setting up a portable DNS name is important. ISPs and platforms change, but if you want to retain those pointers tracked in Technorati you need to have your URLs stay the same.
Nate,
I started blogging for two reasons:
1. To see what was really going on in my mind as it related to my professsion
2. To clarify my thinking about what I saw
Now, I’m hooked as a result of the personal, professional, and client relationships that have resulted. Once the conversations started, my view of the medium and its possibilities really changed.
Hi Nate,
And thanks for the inspiration! My response grew so long that I decided to write a full post about the topic on my blog, you can see the trackback above
For me it wasn’t really a motivation… The industry more or less demands me to do it (at least on 1 particular blog)
Dede & I had launched our website about 5 years ago and were maintaining static journal pages to keep friends & family up on our latest happenings and show photos. The move to Blogger was a no-brainer for me, but Dede was kinda resistant. It took awhile, but the light finally did “click” and she started realizing how much easier is it to let the CMS handle the formatting & publishing. We’ve been going strong on Blogger for 3+ years now.
I started blogging in 2004 to share my travel stories (in a personal blog) and now I blog to promote my writing, share information, network with other bloggers and make some money on the side.
I first found out about blogging while looking for free resources related to Web development. Two of the first bloggers I followed closely were Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer. Reading their writing and finding out about their industry connections, speaking gigs, and book deals motivated me to start blogging. I also work full-time as a programmer, so I have very few opportunities to write at work (even though I work at a newspaper).
Back when I started about two years ago, I wish I had known more about how to build a community around my blog. I just took the foolhardy “Field of Dreams” approach to blogging: “If you build it, they will come.” As many of you know, that’s a ridiculous assumption and hardly anyone visited my blog until I came up with a real strategy and took the time to execute it starting a few months ago. Blogging is work, but it’s work that I enjoy and maybe some day I’ll be a well-connected featured speaker with book deals… just like Zeldman (but I won’t hold my breath).
For some unknown reason I wanted to have my own website, then a friend of mine who has a couple of blogs, put a germinated seed in my head to have a blog on Financial Services. It took a couple of months to sprout, but now I have a blog which is about 5 months old.
Cheers mate
That’s a great idea for an application that could easily be done. A tool to make those images. If i get the time, i’ll give it a go. *idea*
I run two websites business hosted through G-daddy and they provide a free blog. I was not pleased with the limits of their free blog so I moved over to blogger, that was fun and offered more “freedom of design” so to speak. That blog started taking of and I got the hang of blgging hence moving yet again to self hosting Wordpress with a domain name I own. My motivation is to see to what limits I can take it.
How did I first find out about blogging? I don’t really remember any more. Maybe it was through Neil Gaiman’s blog (which he calls a journal). Or maybe it was from reading the SearchDay newsletter. I started reading that because I was interested in using search engines better, and then started paying attention to the SEO and blogging information as I went from being an employee to someone with my own business.
Who or what motivated me to start blogging? Two things: I wanted to get more well known in my field – I’m a professional organizer – and I wanted a place to easily share all the good information I came across all the time: organizing techniques, products, books, etc. I had a web site and an e-zine, and adding a blog seemed like the logical next step. What I never anticipated were the side benefits – the sense of community, the support and friendship
What do I wish I had known then that I know now?
1. Doing serious blogging takes a lot of time. (But then again, maybe if I’d known that I would have been scared off.)
2. Google Reader is much better than Safari’s RSS tools – switching over saved me a lot of time every day. And there a number of blogs I read now that I wish I’d known about earlier on.
3. It’s worth the time to set up your blog under your own domain. (I know that now, even if I haven’t acted upon it yet.)
4. I can bribe at least some of the people I know to take a look at my blog by giving away small prizes for finding the correct answers to a few questions. And it’s worthwhile to do that!
First of all WHY I DIDN’T START blogging earlier .. I was never into “trends”. I see myspace, youtube, stumbleupon and so on and they mean nothing to me. Even forum administration is a trend now and I started forums just because I had the intention of seeing what I can do about this and also share my thoughts about the things I like. And now I have 13 and have to stop starting them since well .. it’s too much.
Blogging is “cool” now too. Anyone who’s worth their salt and pepper would have 1, 4, 20 blogs. (Don’t know how many actually have 20, but well, it looks nice as a number). This is what kept me far from it, since I wasn’t interested. If I don’t like something, I don’t do .. a bit hedonistic, but it was always my choice.
I don’t make sites for money either and the monetization part wasn’t my priority either. I cannot say I saw how big the well known bloggers hit it and that I want to buy a car from the blog revenue.
I had to blog.
After starting my webmaster forums I also started having opinions. Some of them are “bad” coming from seeing way too many ugly sites and snobs who think that just buying a script would make a site excellent. I started ranting on my forums and on other related ones and it wasn’t enough.
As a member in a forum you cannot have your say as you would feel like. As a forum admin and an example of style I just cannot be as “bitchy” as I would like to be when expressing my opinions.
This is when the blogging need appeared. For some months I would just put some of my latest achievements as web designer and site admin, after that I placed some “rants”, some advice, and some “parody” advice I placed in a category called “tips’n twists” since they are tips, but presented in a “twisted” way.
I started taking this more seriously and it brings me joy. Seeing people read my entries and even linking to some, gets me a bit “high”. This pleasure of getting some small recognition is strong enough for me to keep on adding posts in my blog.
It’s not gonna be a super-duper blog. I am not getting a car from the revenue. My name will still remain unknown. But I have few people who like to read it and it brings me great joy to express MYSELF in it. I don’t copy news or articles, it’s just me … naughty sometimes, a beginner in some areas and expert in few things.
* How did you first find out about blogging?
It was on the internet .. many people talked more and more about this. Finally I saw what it was all about. Found the idea to be cool, but just didn’t have the time and reason to start one.
* Where did you first learn about blogging?
I never had a certain place to learn. I just installed Wordpress on my domain and worked from there. I am still learning and doing a lot of mistakes.
* Who or what motivated you to start blogging?
As I mentioned above: the need to express my own feelings, without having to worry I might make someone uncomfortable.
* What do you wish you had known then that you know now?
I wished I knew how to make better blog posts, how to promote better. Many things I still don’t know and in some time the list with “I wished I knew this” will grow. This is the beauty of anything .. you’re constantly learning, facing new limits, overcoming them and seeing new ones and so on. While you’re chasing one limit after the other you grow better and more knowledgeable.
I started my blog just as my dairy. And, have to say, nothing changed to this time. I’m posting there everything I want
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