Image by Dutchproductions

Starting a blog is not easy. In the next few paragraphs I’ll share with you my experience in creating a brand new blog from scratch. Now the design was fortunately not my job, in our Studio there are two professionals for this job, so you can thank them the great design and the great WordPress structure its built on. But the content is my job.

Starting a blog is difficult. If you want to share your content, and if you want everybody to see what you have to say, you have to use marketing effectively, or it will all go to waste. This is the first part I want to tell you: without marketing, or an audience who is watching your blog, or just having a peek at a few posts you can’t do anything. So you have to promote your blog. If it’s a personal blog, you can promote it on facebook, share it with friends on twitter, tell about it to everyone, there are options that are free. You can also digg it on Digg, and make other people watch it. If it is a business blog, there are other means to advertise: google, linking, flyers, e-mail marketing, and there are paid versions as well: you can promote your blog quit cheaply on Stumble Upon for example (5 cents per view), or on Facebook (which is a little more tricky).

It is very important for your blog to post every day, or at least every two days, according to the type of your blog. If there’s nothing on a blog, or it updates every two weeks, nobody will follow it, it might be a simple business site. You have to post interesting thing to the world, so people will have a reason to come back and read you, or subscribe to your RSS feed.

But here comes the third and most difficult problem: posting quality content. You can’t just rip off someone else’s blog and paste in the articles. First it is just wrong to do that, but it’s not quality content if you copied it. It’s just the same thing, maybe said with different words. Probably most of  the blog writers have seen quite a few blogs, and they’re reading a few RSS feeds as well. I’m on at least a dozen different blogs and sites that I read (or listen to) every day. And it is hard not to copy them, but if you want to create something new and original, you have to do on your own. You can get some inspiration from similar sites, see what they did, and what works for them, but posting every day the same articles with a little bit changes word order is just not gonna make it.

You have to put your own personality into a blog. I can see from our blog, that it has many aspects, that other similar blogs have (for example inspiration). But I searched for the sites, or image databases they get their pictures from, and I try to select the pictures I like, or the pictures that are in a specific group (for example sketches, or illustrations), and post them weekly by category. Or there are other elements that I saw on other sites, but they’re completely different, and new, but the original thought emerged from viewing a blog I like. The explained section created this way. Many sites showed websites that are very beautiful and use WordPress, or HTML5, and they are both graphically and structurally great. Now as I looked at the purpose of our blog, I thought, that we can use something like this, but to help our customers and readers, there should be some explaining. Because maybe not everybody understands why does some sites look good, and others don’t. You have to notice the little details, and someone who is not into graphic design, or web design won’t see these differences at firs.

So this is it, the short story of our blog and what a blog should use. If you make sure to obey these three elements, then your blog will probably start to grow slowly, and it can gather a small following group. But if you don’t keep them, they won’t come, or they won’t stay. It’s hard coming up with quality content every day, but it really helps if you just sit down and try to take your own personality into it.