Why all bloggers suck when they start

I’ve spent the better part of the last few days going through the first hundred or so posts I ever wrote on my flagship blog, Cooking by the seat of my Pants. Not because I wanted to, but because the adoption of a new plugin is requiring me to.  In the course of doing so, I came to realize something.

I started out as a horrible blogger and writer!

Those original posts were (and are) terrible.  Even though they serve a purpose, they are a complete mess.  The writing was rambling, not concise and told no story.  Almost nothing I wrote stuck to a single subject or topic, even though the venue makes it nearly impossible to do anything BUT stay on topic.  I honestly wonder how I ever managed to keep growing a reader base in those early days.

If I had been reading my own work with someone else’s’ eyes I probably never would have come back.  I’m pretty lucky that the recipes speak for themselves even though the writing was abhorrent.  Google has been good to me because of that and almost all of my traffic is search engine based.  Recipes are perfect keyword fodder and search engines can’t tell that the rest of the post was useless, rambling drivel.

Practice makes (almost) perfect.

Those first 60 or 70 posts made me want to bury myself under a large rock somewhere. But at some point along the way I noticed that things were changing.  The writing style was evolving.  The posts became more focused and specific even though they were beginning to get longer.  The tone and cadence of the writing became consistent.

There were still horrendous errors in grammar and style but things were far less painful than they had started out.  It was obvious that the writer (me, in this case) had gotten his sea legs under him and had found his own voice in his niche.  He was still a bit shaky, but definitely moving forward. The writer was finally walking on his own two feet, rather than borrowing style from his peers.

From walking to running.

Another 50 or so posts into the blog and it had become obvious that this guy had found his place in his chosen niche.  The writing was confident, witty and read easily.  There was a beginning and end to the posts.  Most of the posts told some sort of a story related to the author’s own experiences.

Rather thatn trying to figure out exactly what he was talking about, the tone head become conversational.  It was more like sitting across a table from him than it was having him talk “at you”.  And the posts stayed that way.

Since I’m talking about my own writing, I also have stats to back up what was happening.  As the writing on my blog got better, the traffic increased.  The increase was gradual but it was definitely there.  It was at the point that I found a way to allow my passion for the topic to show through in my writing that this happened.  As time went on the increase became marked and is still increasing today.  As a very good friend of mine said to me on twitter:

“Sweetie, we all sucked when we started”

It doesn’t matter if you have a masters in English or graduated tops in your creative writing workshop, we all sucked at blogging when we started.  If you’re just starting out today, expect to cringe when you go back in a few years and read your first few posts.  It takes time to find your voice.

A blogger’s life is much like that of a newspaper article writer.  we’re expected to come up with content on a regular basis.  That content is also expected to enhance the lives of the people that read it in some way.

Whether you’re trying to make someone smile, think or to share some really cool tip that appeals to the people that drop by your blog, it’s your job to make sure that they walk away with something they didn’t have before.  if you fail to do that, they just walk away.

It takes time to find a balance between frequent posts, the tone you set in your writing and the amount of “you” that you are willing to put out there.  After a few months of writing in the grueling schedule that is blogging for the mainstream, you’ll just fall into a stride and stick with it.  At that point you will find that it’s a lot less painful to look back on those older posts.

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