Advice on Blogging

In Manuel’s series People and Blogs, he asked me:

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I gave my answer, but I wanted to expand on it.

These kinds of questions are interesting to me.

As readers, I think the answer we’re looking for in a question like this is: “Here’s the few tips I wish I had known when I started blogging.”

Why? Because we believe we can take these tips, use them, and revel in the thought that we saved ourselves some time and headache through someone else’s (hard-won) experience.

However — and this is what I try to get across in my original answer — I think the truth is that you don’t get the same satisfaction saving yourself from pain you haven’t experienced.

The best feeling is saving yourself from the pain you know.

What my blog is now is a result of me wrestling with what it even means to blog. What I love about “blogging” is how personal it is. Even the word, “blog”, doesn’t give you any classifying genre of what content or experience you’ll get from any one individual’s blog.

I’m rambling now, but my point is:

The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way.

Anyhow, I ignore a lot of advice because I don’t understand it when I hear it. Only once I’ve dealt with the pain of hard-won experience do I say, “That’s good advice.”