Like the title says, as a blogger you will learn an incredible amount, especially as you begin. Of course you should always continue learning stuff about blogging and how to become better at what you do, but as with most things, there is a very steep learning curve as you start. Not only do you need to know your topic inside and out, but you need to have a post schedule, what you are going to write about, how you are going to interact with the community, whether or not you are going to bias or write opinionated posts, and many other things when thinking about blogging. I got the idea to write about this when I was looking through my previous posts, namely one that was written within the first couple weeks of my blogging career.

Being Extremely Naive

I’m not sure if it was naivety or the lack of knowledge (very similar), but I was very uninformed as to a few features of the blogging world. First of all, I had no idea how the Feedburner chicklet count was updated. As you notice in that post, I write about Feedburner changing the number of subscribers I had. Little did I know, the count reflects the number of people who visited your feed within the last 24 hours, meaning it can fluctuate vastly. However, when you only have 1-2 subscribers, if that one person does not view your feed, there goes 100% of your readers.

I suppose I learned that along the way, and after reading a few bloggers’ posts about their RSS subscriber numbers.

What Can Be Learned?

As a beginner, I would strongly recommend going out there and doing your best. Of course if I was to read a post like the one I wrote a number of months ago now, I would think that person is crazy. However, in the back of my mind I am reminded that I too started there, and there is only one place to go from ground zero: upwards. Taking that into account, it would be extremely beneficial to research about various terms, criteria, protocol, etc. that affect the way blogging (or whatever it is you are doing) should be done. Not only with blogging, but this can go for anything.

Another great example is one related to working out. Maybe people are afraid to go work out in a gym because they feel they will get made fun of for lifting less than some of the “meatheads” out there. However, these “meatheads” did not decide to start lifting one day and throw on all that weight. Of course there will be some people who think they are better than everyone else, but if all of these now elitists had the mindset that everybody starts at the same place (or very similar, depending on your resources) it would be much easier to succeed at what you do.

If you learn one thing from this post, please remember to not be afraid of making mistakes when you are starting out as a blogger. Instead of having the “worried about failing” mindset, try to adapt the “working to succeed” mindset. Keeping that in mind, it will be much easier to work towards a successful blogging career than if you are constantly hindered by the “what if” attitude.

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