The Blogging Skinny

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Hello there cottage lovers.

I have been head down, bum up for the past 6 months or so, trying my little heart out to learn more about html, SEO, branding, social media and networking, blah, blah, blah – all in the effort to blog bigger, better, faster, smarter.

Now, I am so going to sound like my parents and I cant really believe what I am about to say, but here goes…

When I was at school, computers were huge, clunky, grey boxes that had black screens with a little green blinky curser in the top left corner. We would sit in front of it in class and type in 1′s and 0′s, stuff than not one of us understood except the computer. Back then we called it computer programming. That class quickly became an excuse for me to switch my brain off for an hour and hybernate.

Fast forward 100 years and EVERYTHING has changed in the computer world.

The internet arrived.

The internet is there to help us, to make life easier, to put information at our fingertips, and allow us to connect with others in an instant, right?

Wrong!

There is a deep, dark, cavernous side we dont see.

If you are like me and attended school a 100 years ago, you will not have a skerrick of a clue of anything anyone is talking about when trying to explain how it all actually works! You are excluded, defunked, unknowledgeable, you may as well dig a hole and lie in it. A language comes out of people’s mouths that has never been heard by my 100 year old ears. I become reduced to a blubbering, brainless jellyfish whenever someone tells me anything new. Social media, social networking, web designs, web themes, web hosts, domains, domain names, widgets, plugins, links, tags, SEO, html, code, H1, H2, H3, H4, hooks, blogger or wordpress? Aaaaaaargh!

My brain could’nt take it all in – it was an endless stream of information.

I just wanted to write my blog, to create, to take photos to share, and to connect with others who like the same stuff. And I wanted to do it myself and I didnt want to spend thousands. But everywhere I turned there was a wall the size of a sky scraper blocking my efforts and just daring me to try and pass with ease.

So I went looking for blogs, people, information that could speak to me in a way I could relate to.

Don’t do what I did and jump in feet first and just expect to know how to swim to shore! There is definately an order in which to do things and holes in your knowledge that will need to be filled. But with direction and a little patience it will happen more easily for you than it did for me.

The first decision you will have to make is Blogspot, Blogger or WordPress?

I went with WordPress because I thought I would have more scope to grow and add more pages etc. But it depends entirely on what you want to achieve with your blog and if you decide to change over in the future it can be done, so don’t worry too much about making a wrong decision with this step.

These are the sites I found helpful…

Blogspot, Blogger or WordPress? - How To Make My Blog

Matt Hooper for ProBlogger on the first steps to starting a blog site on wordpress

 This one might seem a bit silly but it was great because I knew NOTHING about Search Engine Optimisation - for dummies like me!

Cara Pring from The Social Skinny can tell you anything you want to know about social media in language 100 year olds like me can understand.

And HTML – which got me all nervous, this site is a very dry read but then HTML is very, VERY dry. Try to stick with it because to have basic knowledge is a good thing in case you ever need it to get you out of HTML trouble.

And thats it – for a start anyway.

Are you thinking about thinking about starting your own little place to blog? What would you blog about?

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