If you want to get a good blog you have to get started, even if you’re not ready!
You may have lots of ideas for what you want your blog to be, or you may only just be starting out.
You may have lots of ideas about how the blog should look, or you may still be trying to work out the designs.
You know that you want to have feature X and feature Y but you’re not sure how to do that, yet.
If you wait until you have all the answers then it’s likely that you will never start! It’s only by getting started that you will move on. I have just read the excellent books by Steven Pressfield - “The War of Art”, “Do the Work” and “Turning Pro” in which he talks about “Resistance” or the thing(s) that will always stop you from doing what you want/need to do.
If you wait until all the pieces of your blog puzzle in place then there will always be a mountain to climb. If you get out there, today and set up a WordPress blog, you’ve made a start. You’ve then got somewhere to put down your ideas and once the first ideas are down more will flow.
Sure, the site might not yet look exactly how you want it, but you’re getting the ideas down. Most importantly of all, you are starting to build some content. This means that as the site comes together there is something for people to look at when they find you.
By writing blog articles, you will get into the habit of writing and hopefully the next article will come that bit easier and you will start to build a flow. Because you’ve got somewhere for the ideas to go where you can access them you know that they are out of your head. This then has a positive effect as it clears some space in your head for the next one and the next one and so on.
Build a philosophy and build a site…
This is the philosophy I am trying to work to in my head.
I’ve wanted to do a blog for years. I’ve had the ideas but wanted to design the website in a particular way and make it work in a certain way but for lots of reasons I haven’t had the chance to get it done. So instead of doing something, I’ve tended to do nothing and pushed it back each time.
I don’t know how my writing will come across and some of it is not 100% formed but I have ideas of how I would like it to grow but instead of putting it off any longer I have decided to just get it out there. I can always edit the mistakes later but if they stay in my head then they are nothing.
There are designs I want to do to the website. I have ideas for how parts of it will work and how parts of it should look. To make it all work though, I need sufficient content to prove that what I am doing is working. I need a balance of long articles and short posts. I need to work out whether I will use images with my posts and if so, what images. What do they look like, what size do they need to be to work well. I don’t know these answers yet but I can find out, I can experiment and I can get things going today.
I know there are changes ahead
The blog today will not look anything like the blog in a year’s time but hopefully a lot of the ideas and thoughts that I write up now will have meaning and value in a few years time. I will be experimenting with layouts and some tweaks to the design. I will find my voice and the way to express what I am trying to say in a way that hopefully others will like and listen to.
I will adapt how I do all of this but the important thing is that I am making a start. It’s only be making a start that we can travel on a journey. The journey has begun, now I’m interested to find out where it will go.
Should you decide to join up for the journey then thank you. You might want to fasten your seat belt in the early days as it may get bumpy and there will be many changes but in the future maybe the ride will get smoother but I hope that there will be interesting parts to the journey.