Blogging- Anyone have a blog ??

[crazycat]

Hi all ,


Does  anyone have a blog ? How long have you been doing it ? Was it difficult to start ? Is it time consuming to maintain ? Do you make any money from your blog ? Please share your experiences - good and bad . Thanks 

[Green Eyed Lady]

I have no answer to any of your questions. I thought there were a couple of posters here who had blogs. Maybe they can help.

[shanendoah]

There are quite a few of us who have blogs. I have one, though it's not currently really active. I've been blogging for quite some time. I used to maintain 4 different blogs (100 words daily, a personal finance blog, a pet blog, and a writing blog). I cut myself down to one, where I write about whatever I want to write about, but right now, that's not anything. I expect I'll take it up again once my family's legal situation has been dealt with. (And honestly, that's where I'll actually tell people about the legal situation - one place that I can direct anyone to, and not have to tell the story a billion times to different people in different places.)

How long - I think I started my first one back in 2010. So for 7 years or so, though I haven't been writing much at all in the last 8 months.

Is it difficult to start - No. Both Wordpress and Blogger will let you start your own blog for free. Just go to their site (most people I know use wordpress) and pick a name for your blog/website and get started. They have all sorts of free themes, so you can make it look like how you want.

How time consuming is it - Depends on how time consuming you want it to be. Do you want to do a new post every day? 3 times a week? Once a week? Are all of your posts writing? Or are you shooting and editing video? Or are some just pictures?

Do I make money - No. I know some people who do. But that was really never my goal. If you want to make money, you can sign up for Google Adsense and other advertising that people click through. Depending on what you write about, you will probably want to find that blogging community. FinCon is the conference for finance bloggers (personal and otherwise) and they are great. There's BlogPaws for pet bloggers.

I went to FinCon a couple of times and made some great friends from that community (one of them I followed there from here). I have had great blogging experiences, but part of that is that I am a writer at heart. I can't NOT write. I'm only not writing on my blog right now because I need to not discuss our legal situation with the world at large until it is actually settled, and it has pretty much taken over my whole life right now, so there's not much else to write about.
I also made good blogging friends from the pet blogs, and still follow the adventures of some via their facebook pages.

But, I also knew from the start that I wasn't going into this to make money, turn it into my full time job, etc. 


NancysSummerSip also has a blog - a food blog, I think.

[debthaven]

There are quite a few WIR posters who have blogs, but I'm not going to out them LOL.

But maybe you should also post your question there?

[crazycat]

Thanks for your replies . I will try posting this over in WIR 

[beergut]

I've been blogging since 2008.

Make sure that whatever you blog about, it is something you are truly passionate about, I would say even borderline obsessive. If you're truly interested in something, you'll never run out of topics to write about.

When I first started blogging, I was being paid to do it. That last about four years, when they decided I wasn't going to run my blog like they wanted me to, and (I think) they tired of hearing complaints from one reader who I banned from my blog. I then went on my own, and get paid every once in a while from ads. Some of my writing has been featured by ESPN and TBS and Fox, so that was cool. 

I wouldn't say it is difficult to maintain a blog, but if you want a constant readership, you need to be blogging constantly, like every day. If you can set aside one hour a day to write, I think you'll do well. 

From viewing other bloggers for a while now, I've noticed a lot of people become burned out and stop after roughly 6 years of writing every day. I think when you constantly feel like you need to write about something, it begins to feel like a job, and people quit at that point.