Photo by Cyndie@smilebig! (Flickr)

It’s been a little over a year and around 170 blog posts later, but it seems like an eternity since I started The Freelance Rant. I have to admit, I went into it not knowing a thing about blogging much less promoting a blog.

Even worse, I wasn’t even a great writer.

I’ll admit, too, that I went into blogging with dollar signs in my eyes.

Now I’m left standing with a whole new prospective: I stopped being an internet introvert and have a soap box to step on.

The dollar signs turned into burned out retinas.

Anyway, here are some real lessons I learned about the whole experience.

You Don’t Need To Be a Writer To Blog

Sure you need to know how to write but we all have our own lingo that, with a little direction, becomes our own unique writing style. And that writing style, in turn, reflects our personality and becomes the true identity of our blog.

Then it’s off to the races. The blog grows and so do you as a writer.

For myself, the hard part was developing that writing style. The only way to do that was to write and write and write. Then write some more. Those first few posts sometimes took a few agonizing hours to write.

I don’t want to say an old dog was teaching himself a new trick but such was the case.

You’ll Probably Suck At First, But So What

A reality I had to face when I started blogging was that, worst case, my posts would suck hard and no one would want to read my blog. Then I quickly found out this was also the best case scenario, especially since I was pretty new to the scene.

I’ve read stories where other more popular blogs have similarly started from nowhere and worked hard for years before becoming frequently visited. So I kept that in mind, put my eyes to the screen and wrote. The plan: keep writing and if the masses come, great. If not, I won’t give up.

Then, after fifty or so posts later (and fifty or so total visitors up to that point), I found a sudden spike in traffic for a particular post.

Eureka! I had found something that worked.  Then the process repeated and other posts were written here or there that drew visitors.

And throughout the whole time, I noticed my writing improved. Coincidence?

It’s Not About The Benjamins

I’ve seen countless ebooks and “help” out there that promise you’ll make five or six figures a year (in some cases, a month) from blogging. This is enough to make you think that, hey,  it’s a breeze. Why didn’t I start this a long time ago?

Bullshit.

Well, not really for those who are making their blogging fortunes. Those that are new to blogging with cashing in on it as the sole intent, however, face a harsh reality.

No, readers don’t exactly come knocking on your blog door and buy whatever crap you’re selling much less click on your ads at will. So therein lied the real issue which is attracting people to my blog.

In other words, I had to think about churning out posts that people read and find useful. And find a lot of them.

Not an easy task.

It’s Not About Me Either

I, being the genius I am, had assumed that whatever I wrote (crap or not) will just get indexed in Google and, in time, people will eventually discover it on the search engines and come flocking over to read it. Slowly but surely.

Uhmmm, not quite.

Then I learned of one word that made all the difference: networking.

For starters, I never caught on the social media train until this year. Nonetheless, discovering Twitter, Stumbleupon and their siblings was a wake up call that these were great tools for getting traffic to my blog.

Then I learned sharing information and meeting other similar freelancers and bloggers was fun. Even better, it’s a great way to learn from other which, believe me, I have. Other bloggers included.

Getting traffic to my blog from social media is just the gravy now.

A Passion Has To Shine Through

I can’t count the number of days where I wrote posts when I was dead tired from working my freelancing gigs. Nor can I count the number of days where just didn’t want to write… or where I had writer’s block… or seeing that I had three visits last week and thinking, “fuck this.”

You catch the drift. But those posts got written anyway.

While discipline was a major player here, I had to know and enjoy what I was writing about in order to crank out those posts a few times a week. Otherwise, I was basically in my old writing class having to write garbage about a subject that I could care the least about.

Passion keeps the words flowing when you aren’t.

Now I Know Why Other Bloggers Die Off

I’m a bit lazy right now to look up stats on all the blogs in the world. I’m willing to bet, however, that the majority of them are in the junkyard of abandoned blogs. Their owners had lost all hope and went back to something that “doesn’t waste their time.”

Like I said above, discipline is a major factor in getting those posts written on a regular basis. There are also other factors, though, which almost made me quit forever:

• Low visitor count
• No money to be had
• Time and effort invested with no results (i.e. low visitors, no money)
• Getting out of the habit of regular posting

While I’m nowhere near the upper caste of the blogging kingdom, I know that continuing to write on a regular basis and finding little nuggets to improve will pan out someday.

Of course, I may be extremely naive too. If ignorance is bliss…

I Oddly have To Follow My Own Advice Now

I’m a firm believer in practicing what I preach. After writing all the advice that I have up until now, however, I made a stark discovery that I wasn’t always practicing what I know.

Yes, you heard that right.

Even funnier is that I go back to some of my older posts to see what I’ve written for a little guidance.

Well, a positive result was that, to keep in line with my preaching, I made quite a bit of changes in how I work as a freelancer. While I won’t go into great detail, it’s pretty obvious the lazy bug hit me a couple times in the past.

Thank God I had myself to give me good advice.

Let Me Know What You Think

Are you a new blogger, too? Maybe a blogger guru laughing his pants off right now? Leave a comment and let me know if you had similar experiences.

Category: Blogging

Tags: Blogging, networking

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