Blogging 101 - Have Fun with it

Blogging 101 – Have fun with it

By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting (Pty) Ltd

At the last count I noticed that I have now officially written in excess of 1900 articles. That’s quite impressive even by my standards.  Sure there have been times when I have written an article every single day.  There have been times when I have even been in advance – that means I have actually written articles before I needed or even wanted to post them.

On the other hand there certainly have been times when I haven’t posted or written anything for days, or weeks or even months.  Those have been times when life just ‘happened’ to me instead of me being in control.  These have been sad times or when my head space has been wrong.  Those were times when I was unable to write because writing was ‘just not fun’!

There is no logical reason to do anything that is not fun and whilst I do understand that there are often tasks that need to get done irrespective of whether we enjoy doing them or not, the reality is that I cannot be creative if I am not enjoying myself, I cannot be creative if I am not having fun and quite frankly I certainly would not have been able to sustain or maintain the number of articles or even more importantly the quality of the content of the articles, if I were not enjoying myself and having fun.

So in order for me to enjoy writing the articles, it is extremely important for me to choose the niche that I am interested in.  The reality is that I write for my own enjoyment.  If what I am writing about is useful to others or if I can make money out of what I am writing about, then for me that is an added bonus.  If I had chosen a niche market in order to write purely for financial gain, I would have, in all probability found the writing difficult if not altogether painful.

Much is said about compromising between what you enjoy and love to write about and what your readers would like to read.  If you only write about what you love and not what your readers would like to read – well then you have a problem because chances are you will be the only one who will be reading what you have written.  Clearly the trick is to either find something that you love to hear or read as well as something that other people love to hear or read, that you are comfortable with and then go with that.

The old adage of “if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” always applies.  You can’t improve if you cannot see that you are improving or if you think that people do not value what you are saying.  So set targets or goals for yourself so that you can track your progress and as you see that more and more people are reading your blogs, so too will your motivation to write more increase.

As your confidence increases so too will your desire to monetize it.  Money is also a huge motivator, especially in the short term.  This can be done in a number of ways and the two that readily spring to mine are add opportunities or affiliate links.

Don’t expect to get rich overnight though –slow and steady usually wins the race.

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or http://www.viljoenconsulting.co.za