So…

It’s been a while since my last entry. A lot has happened over the last 6 months including the fact that I am now back in Spokane, Washington. Yippeee!

I will start doing at least four entries a week starting today. So stay tuned, and hopefully the stuff I post will be useful to you.

I started blogging a few years back when it was the “it” thing to do.  I had many great ideas and thought blogging was the future of the Internet where people would get all sorts of information from other people’s blogs.  Well while blogging is still exploding all over the net and the exchange of information is awesome, I burned out on blogging in a mere two months.

The pitfalls for me were obvious and I did not do enough to avoid them. So the idea in this post is help people avoid the mistakes I made when I started the first time around.

1)    Choose a topic and stick to it.  Yes, I know that my current blog is about everything under the sun, however that will be changing soon.  I was just trying to get a feel for what I enjoy writing about, and now I know.
2)    Make sure you are passionate about what you write about.  This is obviously linked to choosing what you write about, but it needs to be stated.  If you do not enjoy it, or have many opinions on it, then it will be very hard to write about it.
3)    Choose the right blog platform.  I chose is to have my own custom blog using Wordpress and my own server.  This option does cost money for hosting and such.  You can find free services like blogger.com and livejournal.com.
4)    If you use Wordpress or any other tool on your own server or hosting account, do not spend too much time worrying about plugins and widgets.  I spent way too much time worrying about these things rather than concentrating on writing good relevant stuff for people to read.
5)    Monetizing your blog.  You do not have to do this, however it is a good way to make some extra money.  You can use places like google adsense and commission junction to get good ads for your blogs.  My pitfall was spending too much time worrying about the aspect of monetizing the blog.  Blogging is meant to be fun and not stressful, and in the end I always got stressed out about trying to get more viewers so they would click my ads and what not rather than building an audience of faithful readers with good content.  If you have good content the ad revenue will come eventually.

There are many more things to avoid, but these were the ones that I spent way too much time on.  In the end the objective is to write, and to write good stuff that people will find helpful or will enjoy reading.