Things I learned as a blog starter

I've started my blog for a few weeks now and I am finally ready to write something about the experience.

1. Blogging is a lot of work.

I started quite spontaneously. I started off with wordpress, and moved to blogspot. I wanted to do something much more fancy than what I have and what I had which is like a common thing. I think the reason bloggin could be technologically challenging to bloggers is that you never underestimate yourself (Or maybe I never underestimate myself). I mean I've taken and got A+s in my C++ classes and I am technical and smart. (If you want to challenge me, work out a few problems from the challenge tag on the left.) But as computer technology always is, it takes you 30 min. to build a thing yet 3 days to make the thing work. Even if you are satisfied with web-based blogging tools and you don't want anything extra on your web page, there are still a lot of buttons for you to click on no to mention if you want certain buttons on your blog, bookmark links, archiving, two sidebars etc... So the work grow exponetially. Be prepared and be patient, it's part of the fun solving problems isn't it. Eventually, you can sit down with a yogurt and music on and blog without worrying to change your blog's layout, template or whatever for a week. Oh, by the way, I am writing material on the things you might want to do when you start a blog at "start slick with your blogspot blog target="_blank"" (Don't read the article yet. The bigger picture is here and the technical things take quite some time to carefully get done.). I am trying to be most helpful in that post. I'll try to answer or help with all problems.

2.No blending no CTR.

First of all, I want to say somethiing about my attitude towards ads. I get infinitely-close-to-zero click through rate (aka. CTR what google adsense use to pay your blog for advertisement). But I still insistently put ads on my blog for several reasons. I think ads is part of a blog. If you have an elegant arrangement of widgets, posts, and ads, you are a sophisticated blogger. If you hold a bare blog, then you actually equalize your computer with a typewriter. Furthermore, there's a theory in psychology that human nature is actually to fight back. You won't be able to concentrate as well when you have no distraction as given a small amount of distraction. For reasons beyond me, I just think it makes perfect sense. So as a CTR flunker, I stop here for the time being :) But if you really want to actually earn yourself a cup of coffee a day that you can drink when you blog, you have to learn how to blend your ads into your posts.

3. Blogging is COOL.

Following my ads-make-a-blog-cool rant, I want to comment that blogging is very enjoyable. You will be perfectly satisfied when you discover how to put two sidebars in your blog even though one thing overlaps another. Then you rise to your height of your ecstacy when you fix everything the second day. You'll have another wonderful day switching back to the exquisite two column arrangement etc, etc...

It is kind of amazing what you can do with a limited HTML template. When you start your blog, you must read about this limitation and that limitation (or at least I read all that. How stupid I was...). But when you overcome them (I mean only technologically, nothing illegal or anything), you made your blog do something you thought it couldn't do, the best of blogging comes. (Or one of the best parts. Everyone who blogs should of course enjoy the process of writing a little something every day too.)

4. Don't digg it before it's ready.

As you can see, I really don't have that much marketing things as I am just writing for the readers I love. But initially, you have to give a chance for your lover to find you. Blog-sphere is like a deep sea and you start at the bottom of it. I drew the first of my publicity from Digg. I actually like the community a lot. A lot of interesting things going on. But I'm just gonna talk about how to utilize it in here. Digg is very dynamic and for people like me, who don't write their articles perfectly the first time, you shouldn't digg it too fast. If you digg it, you don't get a chance to digg it again (to avoid the abuse of the system). So your article will simply sink and never to be rediscovered again :) (Unless you have a very loyal audience but that will only happen after a while).

5.Length and topic

I don't recommend writing for too long. I am kind of breaking the rule here but I think most people check out blogs for very short length of time so they might not actually get to the good stuff. I guess even when you really want to write very long, you break it into pieces. I don't like articles broken into pieces myself but that's a common practice for most of the big sites.

I won't say too much about topic but I think because of the majority of the people who surf around and get the most information are still tech people, you'll get the most traffic if you blog about popular things. There can be but only very few people who will read deep deep thoughts etc. People tend to go superficial on the web in a way. But I am stretching my patience too and I think if you blog serious, then after a while, you'll gather around a very stable reader basis. It all kind of depends on what you really want.

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