This blog is speeding toward it’s one-year anniversary. I’ve learned a lot since I started blogging, but these are some lessons I’ve learned over the past year here:
1. Daily blogging is sustainable. When I started this, I didn’t know if I could manage it. Now I’m pretty sure I can.
2. Ninety percent of the time, I’m writing to meet a deadline. Like right now, I know I need to get this post up so I can move on to other things I need to do today. Deadlines aren’t bad.
3. I don’t write because I like to write – I write because I like the results. I love jotting down headlines and short thoughts, but I don’t always love developing those thoughts into posts… even 150-word posts. The more I keep the results in focus, the easier it is to write.
4. Different readers like different topics. For example, most of my close friends don’t care at all about my blogging tips, but most of my Twitter followers do. Never try to please everyone.
5. The most important part of any post is its title. A title is a promise. Without a compelling promise, no one reads.
6. People love profiles. As I mentioned when I started creating the profiles, I’ve wanted to write them for my journal since I was 10 years old. I just didn’t know everyone else wanted me to write them too.
7. Compiling an ebook out of all the posts from a year’s worth of daily blogging takes a long time. It might be a better idea to do this once per month instead of waiting until the end of the year.
8. No one, not even my mom, reads every word. So in conversations especially, it’s better to assume no one has read and let someone else point out that I blogged it than to talk like it’s common knowledge.
9. The dynamic of a personal blog is worth the effort. I was skeptical of personal blogging before starting because I don’t enjoy many of them. Since then, though, I realized that’s the point. Personal blogs are for a select, teeny, tiny audience, and the atmosphere that results is missing on blogs that focus on a topic rather than a person.
10. Blogging can wait if the other activity directly involves other people. In other words, face to face trumps the Internet. Keep in touch. Literally.
