Starting blogging? Sharpen your shovel, you have some digging to do!

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

Starting a blog?  First thing to do is grab a shovel and start digging

Some folks starting a new blog already have a lot of background info on the technical side of blogging from some source…prior blogging, techie job, etc.

Not me…I started my blog before learning that little round thing on the side of my laptop was a CD/ROM drive, not a cup holder.  Working from stupid, the first thing I did was grab a shovel and start digging a nice, deep hole.

After spending 2-4 hours a day for two weeks playing with the theme options I had my blog designed (two weeks that should have been 45 minutes max.) and was ready to write.  Now what?  I actually sat down at the laptop and wrote my first, very short post:

“OK…now I’m a blogger.  Now what?”

“What” turned out to be sporadic attempts at keeping fresh content flowing.  I was moderately successful and the content grew as I added posts.

Right here is where I started digging the hole.  As I said, I was writing posts…the problem is I was calling them pages, and publishing them as such.  20-30 posts in I had 20-30 pieces of content I had designated as pages, and a thought crossed my mind:

“Oooops, I think this is gonna be a problem”.

“Gonna be a problem” is where I started REALLY working on making that hole deeper.  It wasn’t a problem…yet (those “yets” will always get you eventually) so I kept writing posts and calling and treating them as pages.  Unfortunately, it’s easy using WordPress and the Atahualpa theme to dig yourself way, way deep before you know you are in trouble.  Using “parents” for pages you can keep things categorized…sorta…for a long time.

Then one day I realized how hard I was making my readers work for information.  If someone wanted to know about radiant floor heat they had to drill down through “yurts” from 6 general topics, then “construction” from construction, yurt living and yurt history, then “radiant floor heat” from 6 different construction topics.

That is just too much to ask of readers.  I made the first smart decision about the blog backend since I started…

I Googled “WordPress, page vs. post difference, page to post changes“.  Up popped a website by some guy out in California who called himself “Dr WordPress” (yeah…right!) [long story -dave] with a website called Website-in-a-Weekend.

This was going to be easy… I’d email this guy and ask how to change pages to posts automatically without re-doing everything and I’d amble along writing posts and actually calling them posts, not pages.  Problem solved, blog chugging along, right?

Not exactly.  Doolin NEVER gives a simple answer, even to the simplest question [Bob lies like a dog here. -dave].  He takes answering a question to the art form level.  I ask how to make pages posts and back comes an email:

1. How much traffic do you have?

2. How long have you been indexed by search engines?

3. How many of these do you need to change?

4. If you don’t mind, send me the URL of a few of these so I can see what you mean.

I don’t think this is going to be that big of a deal.

-d

ps: I would like to use your question in a blog post.  Thanks!

OK…I’m looking for free advice…I can do this little bit.  I can send him a few URL’s and why should I care if he uses it in a post?  So…off went another email to the good Dr D, and sure enough an email was in my inbox pretty quick.  My thought?  “Oh good, now I can fix it and move on.”

I didn’t know Doolin then like I do now.  The email read:

Bob,

Ok, it feels like you have a lot to say, and

not quite sure how to

1. Say it,

2. Present it.

Will you commit to a 7 step “blog improvement program” over the next 2 weeks?

It will cost you about an hour per day (no money),

and you’re going to have rewire your belief about

technology.  Tech is *hard*.  It’s hard for *everyone*.

People that are good with tech are simply inured

to the pain.  That is all.

What I’m going to ask you to do is read

a few of my blog posts, and implement

exactly what I ask you to do in those posts.

If anything is unclear, leave a comment

on that post, I’ll fix it.

You WILL get traffic as a result of this.

-dave

ps: It’s not hard to succeed at blogging, but it does take commitment, and time.

pps: Answering your original question, it probably doesn’t much matter at this point… you need more structure and focus first.

That first question…”can I change pages to posts”…was one year, one week, and 4 days, 528 emails back and forth, ago.  I’m still learning how to not dig holes for myself, and I’ve gotta admit, Doolin has been a great help.

Don’t tell him I said that…his head will swell up.

Next time we’ll talk about how to climb out of that hole.

Robert Hayles is a semi-retired Luddite, who actually wished Y2K had been as bad as advertised. Bob's hobbies include fishing, homesteading, alternative housing (yurts), cooking, annoying politicians by constantly asking them, "Is that constitutional?", reminding them who they work for, and suing them when they don't get the message. In his spare time, Bob blogs while hoping to someday take us back to 1850. Meanwhile he's happy cramming sharing his opinions with everyone. Visit Bob at Juicy Maters.