One Hundred Posts

I promised myself that if I ever get to hundred blog posts, I'm going to blog about my blogging. My blogging started March 2010 and after first half year I started to blog much more often and I got to hundred in in year and two months.

I can't exactly remember why I started blogging. I've been following blogs for years and years, but never really felt like blogging. I first tried with sports related blogging about two years ago, but it never really got off. No one read it and I didn't really like it. So I changed my language to English and started to blog first about books and then gradually moved to anything interesting.

The subject in question

One thing I used to think a lot was a subject for my blog. What would be the key thing to blog about. Most of the blogging tips where saying that concentrate on niche subject to get more readers. Also most of the blogs I followed was one subject blogs. I tried and tried to come up with an specific subject for my blogging, but never did. Finally I thought that I rather constantly lose many of my followers because I blog about so many different things, than try to stick with one thing and then lose my interest to this all together. I've noticed many many times that I lose readers due to wide variety of subjects I blog, but that's true me. I rather be myself with fewer people than try to please everyone.

Why I blog

At first it started with this personal branding type of an idea to get more visibility if I ever would decide to change job or start my own business or something like that. Soon I found out that I like it and blogging came a true hobby for me. For me it's like hanging out with my thoughts. It's so nice to be able just concentrate on things I feel interesting and just be totally me. Actually I haven't even told most of my friends about my blogging, just because I want to write to web, not to some guys I know already. It makes me more to be me, because I'm not writing for any known audience. Again I could get quite many more readers from my friends if only they would know I'm blogging, but that's not my point at all, so I haven't done so.

Tips - or how I blog regularly

There's couple of small things that makes possible that I get a blog post that regularly. I tend to try to get at least 2 posts out in a week, hopefully 1-2 more. I do work for living, I have two small daughters with whom I try to spend all their wake up time with, I try to exercise 5-6 times a week and I use too much time watching sports from TV. Still I tend to achieve my blogging goals. I'm not going in details of my priority management, but my main points related to blogging are:

• Write when you  have time and energy for it. When I get to the mood, I tend to write multiple blog posts at once. Then I publish those later. I normally have at least one blog post ready for publishing. Lean experts might say that this inventory is waste, but I don't see any other alternative to publish regularly, since interval to find time for blogging varies so much.
• Always write your thoughts down. I currently have 18 blog posts with some texts or ideas written down in blogger. Then I have couple more on my mobile's notebook to be transferred to blogger. This way even when I'm not right away inspired to blog about something specific, I check my drafts and most often I find some post to complete from those.
• Follow inspiring blogs and web sites. I really often get ideas for new posts when I'm checking some videos or reading something. I do follow twitter streams also, but I'm not sure if I've ever got any ideas to blog about from twitter. Good old Google reader and RSS feeds, with proper longer blog posts with images and videos work much better to inspire me.

Thanks

It's been fun to notice that there have been more and more people checking my blog out and hopefully there's some people who really enjoy it. Either way, I'm not gonna stop because of too few readers or anything, since I really like this. Thanks for you too, if you really read this post this far and have been reading my posts some other time also.

I wanna say special thanks to Vasco Duarte, who is a colleague of mine, he's been (most probably he don't know this) a kind of a role model for blogging to me. In the beginning I was checking his blogging a lot and got some good ideas from there. I know he's been reading and commenting on my posts once in a while too, so thanks Vasco for that.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen