Blogging? Not Again!

Read our lips: this is the last time we write about blogging on this website. Ever.

We didn’t plan on writing anything else about blogging after publishing Who The Hell Reads Your Blog
Anyway? We don’t enjoy blogging about blogging, because, generally, blogs about blogging are banal
and vapid and they just don’t interest us (Corbett Barr‘s Think Traffic being the exception). Heck, we
don’t even read many blogs, but…

Reasons You Should Blog

Today we were inspired to research and write this essay after
reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog, in
which essay he discusses 15 great reasons why you should start a
blog. “Why” being the key word here. In other words, he talks
about the purpose of blogging, not just the “how to” aspects.
That’s what all these other blogs about blogging seem to miss, they
miss the purpose—the why.
Reasons You Should NOT Blog
So, Joshua Becker gave you 15 reasons you should start a blog,
and we’re going to show you how to start one, step-by-step, based
on our personal experience, but before we give you that type of
detailed instruction—which could literally save you the hundreds
of hours of wasted time—we want to give you some good reasons
why you should not start a blog. (Keep in mind that these reasons
are just our opinions and we do not pretend to offer them up as
some sort of collection empirical blogging maxims).
1. Money. You should not start a blog to make money. We need
to get that out of the way first. If your primary objective is to
replace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it.
It doesn’t work that way. Do you think that Jimi Hendrix
picked up his first guitar so he could “supplement his
income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he did it for the love of it, for
the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came
thereafter, much later actually.
 2. Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting internet famous right away.
It’s hard for us to say this, but don’t expect for your site to
grow as fast as our site did. The truth is that we kind of got
lucky. We got a great domain name, somehow created a logo
and site design that people really liked, we write fairly well,
and our content connects with people in a unique way. We
also have a lot of experience leading and coaching people,
experience that shows in our essays. We didn’t start this site to
become famous though. That’d be ridiculous. Our notoriety
and quick rise to fame, as it were, came as a surprise to us,
and was a result of a little luck and a lot of hard, passionate
work.
3. Traffic. Not all traffic is good traffic (as we explained here),
so don’t worry about getting thousands of readers right away.
We’re honored to have tens of thousands of readers each
month—more than some of our favorite blogs actually—but
we’re even more honored to have the Great Quality Readers
that we have, the ones who are engaged and who follow us on
Twitter and Facebook and who comment on our site. Perhaps
Jonny Lang (the blues musician) said it best with a lyric that
seems to be a synecdoche for any creative endeavor
(coincidentally, the song is aptly titled “One Person at a
Time”):
It would sure be nice to go triple platinum
But there’s no guarantee it’s ever going to happen
And if I can only reach one set of ears
I know that I fulfilled my purpose here
The funny thing is that all these things can happen. You could
make a full time income off of your blog; we do it, Corbett Barr
does it, and so do many others. And you could become internet
famous like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan.
But if these are the sole reasons why you blog, you’ll be miserable,
and it will seem like a job, and you won’t be passionate about it,
and you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall flat on your face, or (c) hate it
and fall flat on your face.
Instead, write because you’re passionate about it…
Recommendations for Your Blog
We get emails every week asking for advice on starting a blog.
These are the things we tend to recommend.
1. Find Your Niche. You needn’t a niche, but it helps. What are
you passionate about? Have you found your passion? If so,
write about that. If not, then you must first find your passion.
And you probably shouldn’t blog about…
2. Minimalism. Do not blog about minimalism. There, we said
it. But, more specifically, what we mean is don’t just start
another minimalism blog. Minimalism, almost by definition,
is banal and void of substance (that sentence was painful to
write). So don’t write about minimalism unless you’re certain
that you have an utterly unique point of view that will add
value to others in a way that other sites don’t add value
currently.
3. Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve found your niche,
you need to know who will be reading your stuff. For
example, we write about living a more meaningful life; our
ideal readers are people who are interested in exploring
minimalism so that they too can live a more meaningful life,
so that they can grow as individuals and contribute to others
in a meaningful way. If you want to write about your newborn
baby growing up, that’s great; your ideal readers are probably
 your friends and family, and that’s cool. If you want to write
about restoring classic cars, that’s great too. Tailor your
writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or your local
community or whomever else will read your blog).
4. Add Value. Your content must add value to your readers’
lives. This is the only way you will get Great Quality Readers
to your site (and keep them coming back). Adding value is the
only way to get someone’s longterm buy-in. We both learned
this after a decade of leading and managing people.
5. Be Original. Yes, there are other blogs out there about the
same thing you want to write about. Q: So why is your blog
any different? A: Because of you. You are what makes your
blog different, it’s about your perspective, your creativity, the
value that you add.
6. Be Interesting. Write epic, awesome content. Especially if
you want people to share it with others.
7. Be Yourself. Part of being interesting is telling your story.
Every person is unique and your story is an important one.
The important part of story telling, however, is removing the
superfluous details that make the story uninteresting. A great
storyteller removes 99% of what really happens—the
absorptive details—and leaves the interesting 1% for the
reader.
8. Be Honest. Your blog needs to be real—it needs to feel real—
if you want people to read it. You can be your blog or your
blog can be you. That is to say, do you really embody the stuff
that you write about? If not, people will see through you. Be
the change you want to see in the world, is the famous Gandhi
quote. Perhaps bloggers should be the blog they want to write
for the world.
9. Transparency. Being transparent is different from being
honest. You needn’t share every detail about your life just for
the sake of being honest. Always be honest, and be
transparent when it adds value to what you’re writing. (You
won’t ever see pictures of us using the restroom on our site;
it’s just not relevant.)
10. Time. Blogging takes a lot of time, especially if you’re
as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours testing the fonts
on this site). And see those black Twitter and Facebook icons
in the header? We spent four hours on those). That said, once
you have your design set up, don’t tweak it too much, spend
the time on your writing.
11. Vision. The reason our site design looks good is because
we had a vision of how we wanted it to look, and then we
worked hard to make that vision a reality (N.B. neither of us
had any design experience prior to starting this site). It’s hard
to create a great looking site if you don’t know what you want
it to look like.
12. Find Your Voice. Over time good writers discover their
voice and their writing tends to develop a certain aesthetic,
one that is appealing to their readers. Finding your voice
makes your writing feel more alive, more real, more urgent.
13. We Instead Of You. The best bit of nonfiction writing
advice we ever received was from Joshua Becker when we
wrote a guest essay for his site. He asked us to use
“statements of ‘we/our’ rather than ‘you/your’ especially
when talking about negative behaviors or tendencies.” It reads
far less accusatorially. Think of it this way: we’re writing
peer-to-peer; we are not gods.
14. When To Post. Q: When is the best day/time to post a
blog post or an essay? Answer: It doesn’t really matter. We
 don’t adhere to a particular schedule. Some weeks we post
zero essays. Sometimes we post three.
15. Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter and
Facebook to help connect with readers and other bloggers, but
don’t get too caught up in it. Focus on the writing first, social
media thereafter.
16. Negative Criticism. We have an off color apothegm that
we use for negative commenters on our site: screw ‘em. Sure,
we get a lot of negative comments and emails from people
who aren’t really our readers (e.g., “are you guys gay?” and
“you’re not real minimalists” and so forth). We call these
people seagulls: they fly in, shit on your site, and fly away.
But we pay them no mind; our site is not for them. Delete
their comment and move on.
17. Research. Spend your time researching what you’re
writing about. The reason we are able to use so many helpful,
relevant links in our essays is because we put in the time to
research our topics. That doesn’t mean that we read these
blogs regularly, but we put in the time reading them when
we’re doing our research.
18. Keep It Simple. This is where minimalism can be
applied to any blog, irrespective of its genre. No need to place
superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site; stick
to the basics and remove anything you don’t need.
19. Picture. Put a picture of yourself on your blog. People
identify with other people. If two two goofy guys from Ohio
aren’t too afraid to put there pictures on their site, then you
have nothing to worry about.
20. Comments. If you’re going to have comments on your
site, then read The Five Words That Kill Your Blog by Scott
Stratten.
 21. Live Your Life. You’re blogging about your life (or
about certain aspects of your life, at least), so you still need to
live your life. There are things that we always put before
writing: exercise, health, personal relationships, coffee
(Joshua), advanced-knitting and crochet classes (Ryan).
How to Start Your Blog: Step-by-Step Instructions
Now you have a bunch of advice and a bunch of homework (i.e.,
links to read), and you know what you want to write, and you’re
ready to get started, but you don’t have any idea where to start.
Guess what, neither did we. At all. Literally. We were clueless. We
could hardly spell HTML when we started our website last year.
But good news, you can learn from our pain and suffering. This is
what we did:
1. Domain and Hosting. The first we did was go to DreamHost
and register our domain for free with hosting (note: we didn’t
set up a WordPress page first, DreamHost does all that for
you). We also paid DreamHost $10 a month to host our
website ($120 for the first year) (note: we’re a DreamHost
affiliate, so you get a $5 discount if you use promo code
THEMINS). So it basically costs us $10 per month to operate
this site. Then we did an advanced install of WordPress
through DreamHost (and if we had any questions we could
chat with the “live chat” folks at DreamHost for free; they
pointed us in the right direction and made it super easy).
There are also free WordPress or Blogger domains available
too.
2. Theme. We use the Catalyst Theme (formerly Frugal), which
made everything much easier since we didn’t know anything
about coding or building a website. If you want a theme, we
recommend Catalyst because it’s easy and not too expensive
(only $97 and you get to use it for life). Don’t take our word
 for it though, click the link, go to Catalyst, and check out their
demo video; you will be blown away. There are other free
(i.e., harder to use) options out there too.

3. Tinkering. Once we had our domain, hosting, WordPress, and

theme, we spent a lot of time tweaking the theme to get the
look and feel we wanted (i.e., making our vision a reality).
Then we spent even more time tweaking the theme and
arguing about it and tweaking it some more. We also set up a
free Feedburner account so people could subscribe to our site
via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free
Google Analytics account (to track our stats from time to
time). Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to
sign up for.
4. Plugins. We only use a few plugins on our site: “Google
Analytics for WordPress” and the “Really Simple Facebook
Twitter share buttons” plugins (it’s important to make your
posts easy to share with others). They take just a few seconds
(literally a few seconds; it’s just a click of a button) to install
once your site is all set up. If you really want to play around
with some cool plugins though, check Eight Deuce Media’s
11 WordPress Plugins That Will Get You Laid.

5. Content. Last, we started uploading our content (via our

WordPress site). We designed the logo using some free
images we found online and text from a regular word
processing program. We put our picture on the site and we
started writing essays. And the rest is history.