The Blog Starter Cheat Sheet

Most of you may have noticed lots of memes spreading around and touching blog after blog. I think they are good, as they keep the dialogue alive.

I was tagged by eDragonu, to tell you why I blog. I took the challenge, and here you are, my main reasons for blogging, with a little bit of history behind. This history can serve as a cheat sheet for new bloggers, as it includes the milestones of almost 7 months of blogging starting from the scratch.

- Everything started last summer. In June 2006 I barely had an idea that blogs exist. I knew there were some kind of electronic diaries called weblogs, I accidentally had read one, which belonged to a former colleague of mine, who had an affair with another colleague and she shared her thoughts and the love for him in that weblog (we were colleagues about three years, and I had absolutely no clue there was something going on between them)

- In July, I was googling for some personal development articles, for my recently started business, which included sales and management training. Then I came across Steve Pavlina’s blog and I found myself spending a few hours (if not a few days) on reading his amazing and thoughtful articles. I liked it so much, that I decided I want to write one as well. My business was on hold anyway, due to summer vacations, so I had lots of time. Said and done, after one day of brainstorming, I came up with Questallia – a place where people put questions, and then I was supposed to write articles on those topics. I imagined that I won’t be receiving too may questions in the beginning, so the blog included also articles about life, friendship, books, or travels (I had a bad experience with a trip to Egypt and I wanted to tell the world what to expect if going there, so I blogged about Cairo and the pyramids, the Nile cruise and the Valley of Kings, and Hurghada, the Red Sea resort).

- Also from Steve Pavlina’s articles I found out about Google AdSense. Following this trait, I discovered keyword research and I wanted to give it a try. But Questallia was not suitable, because I wanted to keep it focused. So All Tips and Tricks was born, on a Blogger domain. I moved it to its own domain about 2 weeks and some 30 posts later.

- It was clear for me that I want to target the US readers. But I had no idea how to measure my results. In Romania we have a ranking tool called Trafic.ro. What about US? So I discovered Alexa. Not knowing that Alexa is one of the main references out there, I said to myself “OK, then, I’ll check with this Alexa, until I find something more serious”. Later on, I discovered that Alexa reports are not quite accurate, because they gather the data from a pool of users who downloaded and installed a special toolbar, which works only in IE, so in case your visitors use Firefox, they do not count into this equation. That became clear to me when one of my posts got farked and received about 23000 unique visitors in about 48 hours, out of which Alexa reported only some 15000.

- After discovering Problogger, a great resource for new bloggers and not only, I realized that I can turn everything into a business and I started to learn, to read as much as I could. I found lots of excellent marketing advice at Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, copywriting advice at Copyblogger, good humour and advertising tips at GapingVoid, lots of SEO tools and tips at SEOmoz, internet marketing advice at Digital Point Forums, and the best social networking service at StumbleUpon (which can bring your articles into the attention of lots of readers).

So, coming back to my five reasons for blogging:

1. If I like an experience, I try to repeat it as often as possible
2. I enjoy writing and sharing knowledge
3. I like to live at my own pace
4. I need some decent level of income to allow me to enjoy points 1-3
5. I still have enough resources to keep me functioning until my blogging income reaches my desired standard for no 4, as blogging for a living is a long-term journey.

The short answer is that I feel like the fish in the water (who cares about the tank, anyway?)

Now, I tag Lucas McDonnell, Ilker Yoldas from The thinking blog, Vivien from Inspiration bit, Scott H Young and Martin to tell us their 5 reasons for blogging.

Later edit: I was tagged again by StartUpPrincess with the same meme. The answer remains the same .

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