The Great Thing About Blogging

The great thing about blogging is that no matter how off topic and bad your posts get, you always have the power to smite them into oblivion by putting them back into ‘Draft’ status or completely deleting them altogether. The satisfaction of such an action ranks up there with finding a great parking spot in a crowded mall, or beating the lunchtime/dinnertime rush at your favorite eating spot.

Anyways, it’s been exactly 6 months and 1 day since I started getting serious about this blog, and I’ve learned quite a bit about blogging along the way. For example:

  • Never try to direct traffic to your blog by self-promoting your posts via Digg unless you’re uber-popular. Yes, I admit that I tried doing just that during the early posts and was sent back with my tail between my legs. Lesson learned: a mediocre blog remains a mediocre blog whether it’s read by 1 person or an audience of 53,651.
  • For Google Page Rank sakes, stick with 1 domain name! I thought I was doing readers a service by allowing them to type in http://closetblog.com instead of http://theclosetentrepreneur.com. It turns out that you lose valuable and useful user tracking information in the process. I also found out that there’s a chance that Google treats theclosetentrepreneur.com and www.theclosetentrepreneur.com as separate sites and may ding me for generating duplicated content. I’ve found a few methods for redirecting visitors and am hoping to get that fixed as soon as I get a chance.
  • Another thing I learned is that a post which requires multiple edits or leaves you struggling to find the next sentence is a post that shouldn’t make it on your blog. I’ve found that there’s nothing worse than spending an hour or more laboring over a post only to find out that you’re having issues making your original point.
  • Blogging is a great way to meet individuals, set/achieve goals, brainstorm and daydream, and share valuable information and experiences.
  • Along with the learnings noted above, I have also found that blogging is all about your passion and pouring yourself into your posts. That may sound obvious, yet I’ve always found myself walking a straight line and not trying to be too outspoken in the fear of upsetting or insulting someone – in the process, the posts have become sanitized to the point that they’re not completely representative of what I think or feel. I’ve also been too quick to shoot down something that I find entertaining and fun to write about, yet fear that someone might not find value in it because it’s not serious.

To this point, blogging has definitely been a positive experience. For starters, in the last 6 months the site has achieved a Google Page Rank of 3 and doing a Google search for “closet entrepreneur” lands the site 2nd to lifehack.org in search results – I’m totally cool with that (for now). In addition, the networking has been incredible. It’s nice to be able to chat with individuals who are out there making great things happen on the web.

Still, I know that there’s much to improve on. In the last 3 weeks, I’ve seen an increase in traffic due to a post about Morning Sidekick’s “My Cubicle” parody. Unfortunately, not many people have stuck around – a prime indicator that posts on this blog could be better. So in the next 6 months, I hope to 1) continue to work towards becoming an actual business owner and share in that experience, and 2) breathe more life into these posts so readers have something worthwhile to read and enjoy.

Sincerely,
The Closet Entrepreneur

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3 Comments

  1. Hey Tomas, I can relate to alot of this post. I think my biggest problem is that I still feel my blog is not quite done. As a result, I don’t take my time in posting. In the future I would like to write some meater post.

    But, you know, it is fun. It’s an outlet to get things off your chest and see if others feel that same way you do.

    You say, “you want to continue to work towards becoming an actual business owner” tell us more about that. What business do you plan on starting, what’s your passion, what’s your plan?

  2. The great thing about writing is that you can be a writer with an audience without having to write a book.

    When I was growing up I always thought that you would have to write a book if you wanted to be published, but I could never imagine writing hundreds of pages about a single topic.

    Now I can write about chain smoking chinese monkeys (see BrainFuel this afternoon) or Brazilian drinks. Yay for multiple topics!

  3. TOMAS

    You say, “you want to continue to work towards becoming an actual business owner” tell us more about that. What business do you plan on starting, what’s your passion, what’s your plan?

    I’m glad you mentioned that Mark. I’m actually about a week or two out from starting to post all the details about what I’m planning on doing. This last month has been pretty hectic and thankfully life has settled down to the point where I can start focusing more of my energy into my future biz, so definitely stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

    Chris – “chain smoking chinese monkeys”? I can’t wait! 🙂

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