The Five Minute Guide to Starting a Blog

I was asked recently for some advice on starting a blog, so here’s a five minute guide:

1. Download Live Writer from Microsoft for authoring your posts.
2. Set a reminder in your calendar once a week to write for 30 minutes.
3. Get Evernote, a moleskin, or use Live Writer to make notes when you come upon a problem you have solved, or you’ve learned something new. This can be a link, a paragraph, or maybe a sentence. Get in the habit of making notes.
4. Save your posts as drafts. When you get ten complete posts, which means proofed and checked (preferably by a friend or spouse), note how long it took you to write ten posts.
5. Set up a blog at Wordpress, Blogger, or Typepad. Any of them will do.
6. Schedule your posts out at the pace it took to write them. If you wrote 10 in 10 weeks, schedule one a week. If you wrote 10 in 20 weeks. schedule one every other week.
7. Keep writing, and keep publishing.

That’s it, and it’s simple, but it won’t build a good blog. You have to do that work yourself, but pace yourself and build a blog that you can sustain.