Surfing the Internet Waves

Passionate about writing? Become a passionate blogger

December 14, 2009 at 9:37 pm (Blogging, Social Networking)

Before the Internet, having passion for a subject and writing about it was easy. However, making it accessible to millions of people within minutes would have been just a dream, something impossible unless, of course, you had lots of money and knew the right contacts.

Nowadays, if you’ve got something to tell the world, you can do it… and within minutes. You will still need the “right” contacts if you want your message or ideas to be passed on but, hey, at least you won’t need the money to make it happen.

So what are the three steps you can follow to become the proud owner of a successful blog?:

1. An idea: what do you want to talk about? If you are passionate about something, that’s probably the best subject you should base your blog on as you will be able to transmit your passion to your readers.
2. A blog (of course!): You can create a blog for free and start writing about your favourite subject within minutes. Personally, I’ve used Blogger and, most recently, I’ve started to use WordPress. Depending on your reasons for blogging (earn money, sharing your ideas, etc.) you might prefer one or the other.
3. Loyal readers: Although you don’t really need this step to have a blog, you will probably want an audience, people interested in what you’ve got to say. After all, that’s the point of having a blog, isn’t it?

I’ve got a couple of friends who have great ideas they could use to start their own blog. After suggesting that they could create a blog the answer I got was  something like: ‘Oh, I’m not good at computers’ or ‘I’m not a techie person’.

The Internet is part of my everyday life so those answers shock me a bit and not because I expect a good writer to be Internet savvy, but because they don’t know how easy the step 2 is.

Blogger and WordPress are two good choices if you are thinking of creating a blog but, as with many other things, deciding for one or another will come with the benefits of the pros and having to accept the cons. Some users might find more benefits or inconveniences that I haven’t listed so please feel welcome to share your opinion and experiences:

Blogger

Pros:

• Flexibility to personalise your blog (themes, colours)…
• Use of AdSense. Is your blog popular? Then you might want to make some money by letting other sites advertise on your blog.

Cons:

• Available themes look very basic and outdated.

WordPress

Pros:

• Available themes have been nicely designed.
• Control Panel is easy to use.

Cons:

• If you are looking at personalising your blog out of the basic functions provided through the control panel, you will probably need to upgrade your subscription. The fee isn’t high ($14.97/year; around £9.20), but you might decide that the available themes will do the job just fine.

All in all, if you are a great writer or simply want to share your knowledge but computers aren’t your thing, then remember that creating a blog is the easy step. Keeping it up-to-date is the hard part!

What’s next? Finding your audience. This will depend, of course, on how popular you want your blog to be (public or private). If you decide that anyone will be able to read your blog, then you might want to promote it using Twitter… but, hey, that’s another story. Start by enjoying the first steps.

So there you go . This post is dedicated to the non-techie, those who are passionate about writing or sharing knowledge but didn’t have the know-how to start blogging.