Three Lessons Blogging Has Taught Me So Far

I couldn't have anticipated the impact that blogging would have on me when I started less than a month ago. It seems like an eternity since then - I've learned so much about myself, blogging and writing and there's still light years ahead of me.

I initially began my own personal blog SunofSam for practice. Over the summer, a friend and I cooked up the idea of starting our own music blog, which in turn morphed into starting a pop culture blog. I was extremely excited by the idea, creating style guides and strategically thinking of plans to market it around campus and on the internet. However, what kept me up at night was the fact that I had never blogged before. I wasn't sure if people would like my writing, if it would be entertaining, funny etc.

I figured that blogging would be easy. I assembled a brain trust of people I knew around me to contribute and I figured that since we were are all socially connected with various groups of people, getting readership would be no big deal. I figured that we would just use Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to push our blog and be big in no time.

Thank goodness I started my own personal blog because I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Lesson number one: Blogging is not easy.

Actually, it's quite easy for anyone to blog; all they have to do is post some opinionated drivel on a page and call it blogging.

But all types of quality writing, blogging included, require research, dedication, time and practice. I realized that it wasn't just easy for me to sit down and write a post about a newspaper article I had read. I had to do research, find a picture, proofread, and then there was the actual writing. People forget how hard it is sometimes to master the blank page. How do you start that opening paragraph? What am I trying to get my audience to understand? Does my headline draw people in? And then while writing you might find that your post morphs into something else, requiring you to change everything. So after completing a series of posts, I often began wondering where all the time went.

Since blogging consumed so much of my time, I realized that once school started, and with other blogging assignments soon to come, I would have to create a schedule. The way I was going about blogging was simply getting ridiculous. I would write well into the night, completing about 7 blog posts for the following day. And then I might write even more if I saw something interesting I didn't see the day before. This was simply unsustainable over the long haul and even after one week, I was feeling a little burnt out.  

Lesson number two: create a blogging schedule that works for you.

Determine how often you are going to post, what days, and try and write your posts beforehand. You'll thank yourself later.

As I stated before, I was setting myself up for major disappointment when I expected to just waltz into the social media landscape and have an impact.  

Lesson number three: crafting a social media strategy requires patience and experience that I didn't yet, and still don't have.

I remember creating a Facebook fan page for my blog, and inviting my 600 plus friends. I expected a good chunk of them to "Like" it and then read my blog posts, and in no time average hundreds of viewers. Guess how many of the 600 have actually responded to date? Only about 50.

And I expected to be an Influencer on Twitter as well, only to realize that I had no clue how to use it. And even when I felt that I was making headway into understanding Twitter, I'd be lucky if I got one click from Twitter linking back to my blog.

There are many sites, guides and gurus who claim there is a magic formula to get you 1000 readers in a day, or whatever. But fortunately for me I decided to throw myself into the fire and got burnt a little, which was all for the best.

I could continue on about all the things I've learned from blogging, and I probably will in another post, but I didn't want this to be a self-help post for blogging. I don't have the experience yet to write one of those.

What I hope to convey through my own experience is that creating quality and engaging content requires time, hard work and strategy to get that content into the hands of readers. I hope that beginning bloggers reading this will be able to relate. What is your experience?