Birth of a Blogger

This month How to be an Original turned one year old. A year ago on my birthday I decided to start this blog and hardly a week later I published the first post. Little did I know what I had gotten myself into…

Conception

After a year of trying to earn a buck by playing poker online, I decided to try something else. Playing poker was usually break-even or slightly better, but I lost the fun and it consumed massive amounts of time. It was time for something more constructive, something that delivered more value both to me and to others.

I have always had the feeling that I should start my own business, but apart from a small ‘business’ I had when I was a student I had never really taken steps to make it a reality. On that birthday I decided it was time to actually do something about it.

Next question: How to start your own business in spare time? I needed the income from my day job, so quitting wasn’t an option. I wanted to start a (freelancing) business in training and coaching, but I lacked both the training and experience in doing so (the passion is there though!). And I knew that I needed to put in a LOT of work in developing my ideas.

At the time I had just discovered Guy Kawasaki’s blog only weeks before, and the idea of starting a blog popped in my head. It was perfect for developing my ideas by writing them out, discussing them with readers and for some personal branding as well.

First trimester

After a couple of days of investigating blogging, I decided to just follow in Guy Kawasaki’s footsteps (well, his blogging footsteps…). I registered my domain, signed up for a paid account at Typepad.com, customized my theme a little and started writing.

Being tech-interested as I am, I started to learn more and more about blogging and related services. I learned about RSS feeds, got to know Feedburner, learned about other blogs, learned how to get stats and more. Much more! An old passion was surfacing, I love the internet and the related technology. Why did I stop following the developments? Frankly I still don’t know, but at least the enthusiasm was getting back.

Getting to know other blogs was cool too! I discovered Zen Habits in April and I enjoyed the posts there very much. Clicking around the blog I found some empty pages, and decided to send an email to notify Leo about it. After mailing back and forth a couple of times, Leo offered me the opportunity to do a guest post. At the time Zen Habits had around 10k subscribers if I remember correctly, and my traffic exploded and my readership grew to about 250 subscribers within a month. Now that was encouraging!

It didn’t take long for me to realize that Typepad was not the long-term solution for me. It wasn’t a bad choice, but I wanted more control and had discovered the possibility of self-hosting WordPress as a blogging platform. Two months earlier I wouldn’t have even begun to investigate that, way too complicated! Two months of blogging experience later, I knew what I wanted and I had the confidence that I could manage it.

Second trimester

Moving to WordPress was a success, although I lost quite a few subscribers due to the move (I now know why). I chose a free theme and customized it a lot. That was also my first experience with HTML, PHP (eek!) and CSS.

At this time I decided to take on the Early Bird Challenge and I enrolled in a course to become a certified NLP Practitioner. Exciting stuff for me, and I blogged about it a lot. I also started my weekly review cycles and I experimented with different kind of posts to get a feel of what worked and what didn’t. This period was also when I learned about monetizing blogs and about social media like StumbleUpon.

Third trimester

Slowly I was getting more and more experience, and yet again I was unsatisfied with my site. The culprit this time was the theme, which turned out to be really messy as far as coding is concerned. My knowledge of coding html and css had grown, but wasn’t up there to really understand it. Yet I got the idea in my mind to design a theme from scratch (even after I found Lorelle advising against it).

What I discovered was that I liked designing the theme and writing the code very much. Much to my surprise actually, because I always figured that coding was nothing for me. But the combination of creating an interface and knowing what was going on behind the scenes excited me. My posting frequency dropped a little, due to the fact that I was so busy learning about coding and creating my theme. But it didn’t take long before a new theme was born.

I had to deal with quite some setbacks in real life at that time, with burglaries from both my car and our home within weeks of each other. That was followed by my domain getting abused by a spammer, stagnation of the growth of my blog, and not achieving some goals. The endless possibilities of the internet and the time you can lose in there started to overwhelm me too.

Labour and birth

Labour is a difficult time, that you have to go through before birth (believe me, it’s hard for men too!). It was a difficult time in which I didn’t feel all too well, frustrated by not progressing as fast as I’d liked. Frustrated by the adversities of the past months and finally by physically getting sick. It was time to take some distance to get calm and at peace again. But frustration comes before a breakthrough, hence the break early march.

That break made me see things clearly, and my upcoming birthday reminded me of the reasons why I started blogging in the first place. I looked back at my experiences, and discovered some important things:

• I’m passionate about personal development
• I’m passionate about the combination of coding, design and the internet
• I’ve learned a LOT and improved myself a LOT
• I feel best when I’m actively working on improving myself

Blogging has brought me a lot already, and I have renewed energy to work on the blogs. That’s right: plural. I’ve decided to start another blog to fuel my other passion. I will launch that blog soon, and it will be titled WordPress DIY. It will feature tutorials on how to code a theme, and more relevant stuff related to blogging with WordPress.

Growing up

So a blogger is born. What will become of me? Don’t know yet, but I know I will grow a lot in the coming months. I haven’t started my own company yet, but I’m working as an entrepreneur. Training and coaching are still very much in the picture, and I’m going to pursue that too. But internet has come in the picture as well. I’m curious to find out where all of this will lead me to!

Photos by Crystl, dizznbonn, makelessnoise and myself (in that order)