Writing a Blog

TLDR

Just get started with that one line in your draft. Just write. Write as a habit! :)

Longer version

Disclaimer - I have read very few things about writing blogs. I have written only a few blog posts and I’m not some famous blogger (yet? :P). These are just my thoughts / opinions. I have also heard a bit of recommendations and learned from others, so it’s also reiterating some of those recommendations.

Goals / Purpose of your blog

I think it’s important to define what’s the goal or the purpose of your blog. Different people have different goals and intentions. Someone maybe trying to build an audience for themselves releasing their book to the same audience who are interested to read what they are writing. Someone maybe just trying to make their resume better by showcasing their skills through their blogs. Someone might just want to share their learnings, give back to the community, for free, as they also learned from the community for free. I’m one of those people who has learned tons of things from the Internet, all those free and open articles and also the all time great Open Source Softwares and the community, that power a lot of the world!

So, decide the goals for your blog, and accordingly take decisions for your blog - where to write, what to write etc. Your goals and purpose will keep you on track :)

Mini / Micro habits and Ideas to write

I saw this video recently - Accomplish Everything With Mini Habits

It was about mini habits. I would highly recommend you to watch it and you can easily follow it in your blogging journey. For example, write one small part of your blog post whenever you get time. A sentence, a paragraph, or maybe the whole blog post ;) It’s a weird thing to say though. I mean, everyone writes based on their thought process. What I would recommend is, whenever you get ideas for blog posts, write it down, write down all that comes to your mind - probably some set of words, some possible things you want to refer, like YouTube videos, maybe show some diagrams / pictures, and so on. At least that’s how I do it. So, that’s like the stage one for my blogs usually. And it’s still in draft, yes. Then later I build on it. So, for the initial stage, I only need a few minutes.

Sometimes I also feel that I lose the energy or enthusiasm on the topic as I postpone to elaborate the draft and write the full blog post. Also, it’s highly possible that I didn’t put down some of the ideas on paper or somewhere, and so I would lose out on that too.

And writing in chunks - for example everyday, a few minutes - would mean that I’m getting ideas in chunks or making myself write only in chunks probably. It may help, or may not help. Sometimes a flow of writing is good than just a few words. But it really depends on you, the writer.

So, based on how you write, how you think, choose how you want to write. I believe that habits are still good. You can always try to write a few minutes everyday or some similar interval. Especially when you are pretty blank, maybe writing just a bit everyday can help. Jot down ideas to start with :)

Just do it

Nike’s tag line is pretty much the best ;) “Just do it”. Action is probably overrated. But action is key too, apart from thinking / planning. So, just do it. Just write the blog post, just start writing.

Are you a perfectionist?

I’m kind of a perfectionist too. If you are perfectionist, I just have one word for you, actually two.

“Edit Button”

Edit button is usually always there. Editing is usually always possible. Don’t worry about mistakes. Don’t keep that well written blog post in draft state for a long time. Don’t proof read too much. Once you start doing more of writing, by practice you will also learn how to make things perfect slowly and steadily.

Platform to write

When it comes to blogging, you need a platform to write your blog posts. I chose a hard one I guess :P To start off, I think I would recommend choosing easy ones - define your own easy. :)

One might ask “What to look for when choosing a platform?”. It’s like any other choice / decision, decide based on your goals and needs. Look for the features you want for your blog. It could be any of these

  • Ease of use
  • Editing with Graphical User Interface with drag and drops
  • Page loading speed
  • Compression of images for different screen sizes
  • Accessibility
  • Analytics
  • RSS feed
  • Comments
  • Email subscription system for users for new posts and weekly newsletter
  • Tagging blog posts
  • Searching the blog
  • Available options for fancy themes
  • Built in forum for members who can login and participate in the form
  • Special stuff for members
  • Paywall for members
  • Built in goodies shop
  • Domain name - .com , .io etc. Custom Domain name
  • SEO friendly
  • Responsive site
  • Time to publish and go live
  • Feature to save drafts
  • Feature for series of blog posts to link to series automatically instead of you typing about it in your content
  • Sharing / Social features of the blog post - when embedding links on other websites / blogs - show nice and fancy previews of your blog post’s link with images and description and keep it search friendly with metadata
  • Feature to share the blog post on different platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc
  • Managed server to host the blog vs own server to host the blog

There are probably more features one can list. The above is not an exhaustive list. :P

That’s a lot of features right? ;) The point I’m trying to make is - there’s a lot out there. If you want all, sure, go for it. If you don’t, then that’s okay too!

What I chucked out - Google Analytics, SEO, advertisement on public platforms and a lot of other things.

Currently, I host my blog using GitHub Pages service, which uses GitHub’s servers, and I use GitHub’s sub domain - karuppiah7890.github.io and not any custom domain name like karuppiah7890.in . I also don’t have a lot of the features that I mentioned above. But if you need them, no problem, you can find it on many of the platforms online :) Some of the popular ones that I know of are (from the top of my head)

There are probably many more, so just use your search engines and explore the Internet ;)

I have tried out a few of the above platforms. Later I moved out of them and manually (some of the stuff) hosted my own blog for a few reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog post and are very opinionated. But remember, each has it’s own pros and cons. :)

Cross Posting

Cross posting is a modern thing I guess. You can check out more about it online. The gist is - you can use one platform, some sort of main platform for your blog posts, where you first publish it. Later, you can cross post the same post under your name, of course, on other platforms too and also link back to your original post in a standard format saying “Originally published in …”

This gives you the benefit of reaching the audience in different platforms! :)

There’s also some SEO related concepts in this to help you link back to your original post in the cross post, in such a way that your original post is more important and ranked better when search engines scrape data about all the posts. I think this area is also related to plagiarism issues and ensure that the cross posts are still valid too. I would recommend checking this out in case you care about SEO. I don’t so I never cared to look about it. :P

Also, the platform you are cross posting on, it could also help you with any of the features that you want, similar to your main platform. Again, it depends on what you want and what the platform can provide

Conclusion

Just Write. :) That’s what matters at the end of the day, even if you have chosen the best platforms in the world and have all the features that you thought you needed.

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