Start Somewhere

There are so many articles online on how to write a good blog post and how to make a blog popular. Some of the advice that stuck with me are have a strategy for my content, focus on a niche area and write long and useful posts. Those are helpful advice but have also subconsciously made me fear writing on my blog. Whenever I try to write on my blog, I will go through these advice in my head. Many a times, I feel that what I want to write does not tick all these three boxes. Then, I give up.

This week, I tried to understand why I have been acting and thinking this way. I realised that it was because I feel ashamed to have poorly written blog posts online. I was afraid that my friends or prospective employers will somehow stumble upon my blog posts and see how bad my writings are. Essentially, it is because I want to have a "clean" history online. I only wanted to be associated with well written and useful blog posts. I wanted a blog that will impress readers.

I realised that I was letting my ego take over me. I think that being aware that my ego is stopping me from writing or doing things is a good first step to correcting it.

I follow a few blogs on startup and marketing and I began to wonder if the authors were such great writers right from the start. So I went to find the very first few blog posts on their blogs and compared those blog posts with their recent blog posts. For most of them, there is quite a huge contrast!

For example, Ryan Hoover, who writes incredible articles about products, wrote about quite random things when he started his blog. He wrote about things like Mythical Creatures Drawn by SF Restaurants and An Email from my Russian Admirer. Well-known marketer, Noah Kagan's first blog post on Okdork is a marketing idea for Coca Cola.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not criticising them because they are undoubtedly great writers. Comparing their first few blog posts with their recent ones taught me something. It taught me that I have to start somewhere. It is alright that I do not produce blog posts as good as them now because I have to start somewhere. If I do not write at all, I will never improve.

An interesting thing to note is that they did not delete blog posts which are not as good as those they write nowadays. I find it interesting because I had thought about deleting my lousy blog posts in the future, so as to maintain a "clean" history. However, I realised that it is a really silly thought because when judging if they are good writers, it is their recent articles that matter; not the articles they have written five to ten years ago.

So I have decided that I will start somewhere. I started with this blog post. I know it will not get viral on social media; but it is alright because that is not the point. The point is to start somewhere and I'm glad I have done it.