What Do I Do - Pt 1, How My Passion to Blog Has Been Rekindled

You may be saying, “Okay, I’ve read about you using this blog to test the features, but your blog is called Beginner Blogging 101, so where is the instruction to start a blog?” If you happened upon this article, you’re in luck. I will be covering this information today. I originally called this blog “Test My Blog” because I wanted to play around with the features. It was quickly apparent that I had a lot to learn. I love to help and encourage people, and since I have long adhered to the belief that the fastest way to learn is to teach the material, it was apparent that I should share my experience here.

It was this desire that led me to change the name to “Beginner Blogging 101”. To see how I changed the name of my blog, see my first comment under Page FeatureTest. After posting what I learned, it occurred to me that the next article here needs to be about starting a blog because it’s hard for someone to follow along with me in learning about and implementing all of the features of a blog if they do not even know how to start a blog.

In Pt 1 of the series, I will give you some insight into why I started blogging, how little I have actually put into blogging to date and why I suddenly have a passion for helping others learn how to blog. If you are interested in this insight, keep reading; otherwise, please skip to What Do I Do? – Pt 2, Steps to Start Your Blog Today so you can get started.

My first blog started quite a few years ago as a simple outlet for my rambling. I did not write very often, and to be quite honest, I do not even know what happened to that blog. I have always enjoyed writing, but being afraid to share what I wrote, it was only something I did as an outlet for fun and creativity. While working outside the home in 2011, everyone in our office had an assigned day to share something to encourage one another, and I often wrote my own devotionals. As I shared my writing, my boss and co-workers encouraged me to write because of my ability to share information through the written word in a way that intimidates many. It was this idea that I could write well that made me consider writing as a career so I started writing a novel during my lunch breaks.

My circumstances changed in 2012 when we moved an hour away for my husband’s new job. We had to sacrifice my salary so we bought a fixer-upper, and the idea of a Home Improvement? blog was born. I missed writing devotionals to encourage others so my Balanced in His Grace devotional blog was born. Many challenges over the past year have been detrimental to consistency. As a novelist, I have a tendency to write long articles so I would only write when I could carve out enough time. Being a busy Mom of 3, this happened quite infrequently. I also did not have someone depending on me to bring a devotional to them so I lost some of my motivation and direction to write the devotionals. Between the lack of consistency and the long articles, it has been hard to gain a following on either blog.

The challenges of starting over in a new community have brought discouragement and doubt in the area of blogging. I continued to work on my novel with the intent to finish it by the end of 2012, but it is now clear that I will need to take a little longer than expected. We also had to spend more than intended on the house, so I need to be able to bring in some money. It was this need that led me to reconsider my career and search online. My passion to write, and to help and encourage others, kept overriding every career I discovered online. It was after I read the article How to Make Money with a Blog on ChristianPF.com that I realized that writing is my passion, writing is my career, and writing is how I need to earn a living. This passion to write and help others is now driving me forward.