Is Starting a Blog as Hard as they Say?

You’re thinking about starting a blog, or have just started one, so you found the blogs of several blogging experts and read all about how hard it is to be successful online. You’ve read about all the things that you have to do to get it set up properly, and it’s all very overwhelming. There is SEO, plugins, themes, keywords, opt-in lists, squeeze pages, analytics, you name it. There’s just so much to think about. Maybe blogging isn’t for you after all.
It really isn’t anywhere near that hard, and I’m going to prove that to you. Don’t give up before you get started.

Focus on the Writing

Actually, if you are just starting out with blogging, the hardest thing you have to do is to start writing. For some people it can be a big challenge to get the thoughts in their heads down into words on the page and get them arranged into some sort of coherent order. For others it might just be a terrifying thought that they are going to write something that other people are going to read.
The most important thing you can do when you get started in blogging is to forget about all of the other stuff and just write, as much and as often as you can. Your first attempts may be garbage, or you may surprise yourself and it will actually be very good. Either way, the only way to improve is to practice, and that means to write.
Very few people, if any, will see your blog posts at first. That’s just the way it is. It will take time for you to get the word out and for people to notice and then get around to actually visiting your blog. That’s a good thing. It gives you the time to get several posts written and published. It gives you time to get this thing figured out.

It Doesn’t Need to be Perfect at First

A lot of people think that you shouldn’t publish anything until it is perfect. If George Lucas waited until he thought Star Wars was perfect before he released it to the public then it probably would have never been released. We wouldn’t know what “droids” are, we wouldn’t be telling people “may the force be with you”, and he probably wouldn’t be a very wealthy person. Do the best you can with what you know and what you have right now and see what happens. You will learn from it and be able to do better next time.
Mr. Lucas also showed us that you can always go back and fix or change things when you get the chance. There are at least three versions of the original Star Wars movie, probably a couple more, because he kept going back and changing things as technology improved. Likewise, you can always go back and change or update your old blog posts when you want or need to. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to change a blog post than it is to change a movie too.

Revision Helps With SEO

Here’s another reason to go ahead and get your content published before it is “perfect.” There are several factors that Google looks at when indexing and ranking your content for Google search. I have always heard that age and how often it is updated are two of the bigger factors. The sooner you get a new post published, the sooner that Google can begin to index it and it can begin to age. Then every time you go back and update it to fix an error or update it as information changes, Google sees the update and may improve the ranking. This is the beginning of SEO, or search engine optimization.
The whole point is, if you want to start a blog then just go do it. There is only one thing that you need to be concerned with at first, and that is to just start writing. Don’t even think about all of the other stuff. You will learn as you go and you have time to get everything else in place.