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Last night I found a new comment on another post. It was off-topic, as the writer admitted. But the writer asked some good questions, questions that needed to be answered. So I said I would put my answers here on a separate post.

Here is the comment from “Broken Bells”:

Howdy! I realize this is kind of off-topic however I needed to ask.
Does building a well-established website such as yours
take a large amount of work? I’m completely new to blogging but I do write in my journal daily.
I’d like to start a blog so I can share my
own experience and thoughts online. Please
let me know if you have any kind of suggestions or tips for brand new aspiring bloggers.
Thankyou!

First of all I have to say I’m kind of flattered that you picked me to ask, broken bells, and curious as to why you chose me. I’m not exactly the most “successful” blogger around. In fact I have really slacked off in my blogging over the past year or two. But I’m still here; I still write occasionally, and I’ll be happy to try and give you and other new bloggers whatever advice I can give.

I don’t know how far along you are in blogging, but the first thing you should do, when you decide you want to write a blog, would be to find a platform, if you will…WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, whatever. There are others, but these are two big names in blogging, and I think they are both quite good. I think Blogger is a bit easier to use than WordPress, but you may find you have more possibilities to tailor your blog to fit what you want at WordPress. You’ll have to experiment.

You asked if it takes a lot of work to build a blog? Those two companies make it easy, but it can still be very time-consuming to tailor your blog the way you want it. As far as making it a well-established blog, that’s just a matter of hanging in there, writing regularly, and going to similarly-minded blogs and reading and interacting with them. That is probably the biggest thing. Don’t count on Blogger or WordPress to do that “advertising” work for you. They’ll do it to some extent, because it’s in their best interests to do so. But find other similar blogs and talk with those guys, and build up relationships. You go there, they’ll come and read your stuff. That’s how you will become established and well-known. I personally have a number of friends, like Facebook friends, whom I first met on the blogs, guys I started talking with about subjects we were all interested in. So blogging is really much more than writing, if you let it be that way.

You can go ahead and write whatever you want, and keep your comments closed, and not talk to anybody, if that’s how you want to be. But I have to tell you, if you do that, you will be missing out on the best parts of blogging. Open your comments. Don’t be afraid to interact with the people who read what you write.

So I’m going to stop writing here, and publish this, and open it up to comments and questions. I’ll give you my answers, and if I don’t know, maybe somebody else does. (I haven’t written a whole lot lately; I wonder if I’ve lost a lot of my own readers. If they’re still there, they may jump in with some advice of their own.)