Lessons Learned

My two cents for the day is basically sharing what I've learned through my short career thus far in blogging. I've gotten a few good lessons though probably not as many as a published author or professional blogger of several years.

I think the first lesson I've learned is everyone is, in fact, a critic. It might sound cliche but over my three blogs I've gotten all kinds of comments but without a doubt most of them have been criticisms of some sort. From the helpful hints and tips to the "no you're just wrong type" I've had my share of both. I prefer to receive the helpful kind but it's rather inevitable that as a blogger with any sort of opinion you receive negative comments. Sometimes it is worth trying to listen to what the writer might be trying to say but there are times when I'm just likely to ignore them, especially when they are particularly mean, crude, or nasty. Those I tend to delete and post some small note in a comment as a reply to the effect of "This comment has been removed because..." and fill in the blank. Simply put just because someone is rude to me I don't have to be rude in return.

The second thing I've learned is that readership isn't built overnight. Even with all of the advertising tools built into most of the blog publishing sites traffic to a blog can be very slow. I'm not a very patient person and I never imagined collecting a readership would be so difficult. Of course I never realized that I wanted to collect a readership until I started watching the statistics counter on my blog's homepage. To that effect I have tried to make the best use possible of the various tools to promote my blogs but alas it is more difficult than I had anticipated.

Last but not least, I have learned something about myself. When I first began writing my blogs I had only one and I was determined to publish twice weekly. I then found myself starting another and then yet another for my business. I did fairly well, up to a point, publishing two of them twice a week and the third once a week. Unfortunately I found out that keeping that pace while employed full time is nearly impossible. Slowly I began to drop a post here and one there. The inevitable happened of course, which was that all my blogs suffered a lapse of posts for a rather long while. Learning to write habitually and what to write was a great deal harder that I thought it would be. I am getting better slowly with time though I still have occasional lapses. I still need to learn when to write and how often. The biggest issue with when I write has to do with planning ahead. There are often time periods when family obligations, holidays, and other things fall in the way of my usual odd writing hours.

That's pretty much all it in a nutshell. Lessons learned and those I am still learning. I find that I've said far more on the subject than I intended to. Isn't it funny how some posts just turn out that way?