What’s stopping you from blogging?

Fairy Blog Mother

I was recently asked: “What are the barriers towards blogging?” – so here is my answer:

When I first heard about blogs (all those years ago) my initial reaction was “How do I do it?” rather than “OMG, it’s technical, I can’t do technical!” In other words, it’s the state of your mind that creates the barriers to blogging, not the actual process of blogging itself.

The ‘technical’ part might be a big barrier, but compared to when I first stated blogging, this is less of an issue now. WordPress has done a massive amount towards making it as easy as possible – if you can use Word, you can use WordPress.

It is very easy to create a basic blog in minutes, and my e-courses here can show you how. You can start writing your blog posts immediately, even before you’ve added in all those fancy extras in the sidebars, and since WordPress does all the hard stuff for you anyway, your compositions will start being seen by the search engines as soon as you hit that publish button!

What to write may be seen as a barrier, and certainly for blogging newbies this could be a bit daunting, especially when your told you need to keep posting on a regular basis to make your blog a success. Instead read this post about finding suitable content for your blog, and if you are consistent with your contributions without leaving very long fallow periods, and write good quality, relevant and entertaining posts that people want to read, your blog will do very nicely.

Another barrier might be worrying about what your readers should see, and how much you should reveal about you and your business. This unfounded misconception bothers many small businesses who have yet to obtain the mind-set that publicising their business to the world is a good thing. Certainly reputation is very much worth-while preserving, and etiquette for blogging practices will help to found a good position in the blogosphere, but why not follow the patterns of other great bloggers by reading and observing what they do, to form your own style from them.

And the final barrier would be misunderstanding what a blog is for, or how it can help your business. You need to understand that a blog is a part of social networking, which is all about communicating with your friends, associates and contacts, whether past, present or prospective, so that they get to know more about you (and your business). It is a superb medium that allows you to express yourself in writing, to explain things in another way so that people will understand it better, to gradually build up a relationship with the outside world (as blogging will reach a lot more people than who could do business with you), so you can interact with them through their comments or even by reading and commenting on their blogs.

There will always be some barriers I haven’t managed to cover in this post, so it’s up to you to tell me what they are through the comment box below.

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.