Focussing on the Wrong Things When Starting a Blog – Chris Hannah

I think that, especially when you are starting to write a blog, nearly everything that I see being suggested is detrimental.

Everyone’s telling you to start worrying about SEO, prioritise getting your website linked to from popular websites, working out monetisation, creating a schedule, creating the perfect design, blah, blah, blah.

I completely agree with everything here. Unless you are trying to make a living by doing this stuff (spoiler: you almost certainly can’t, and 2019 is a tough time to start a blog, especially a tech blog) then this is not how I would suggest anyone start.

Worrying about your Google rankings and maintaining a “brand” in the early days is tough and I personally think gets you looking at the whole endeavor in the wrong light. Part of the beauty of writing is that you can find out who you are by doing it. You won’t know what you’re good at, nor what people like to hear you write about until you do it for a while.

Find your passion. Find your voice. Don’t stress about the other stuff until you have the basics figured out.

Oh, and platforms are a rabbit hole you can get lost in. I suggest WordPress unless you have a really good reason to use something else. WordPress in the de-facto standard, instigates with basically everything, and has plugins for basically anything you want to do. Oh, and if you hate it and want to move one day, you can easily export your data and take it elsewhere; you own your content.

And an extra shout out to Chris for having his site adapt to dark mode. BirchTree does this too; switch your device to dark mode to check it out!