Q&A Friday #94: Any Advice About Getting Started With Blogging?

by John Hawkins | September 12, 2008 9:36 am

Question: “Any advice for someone getting into political blogging as a hobby and not a full time job?” — Dick_Nixon

Answer: The key thing with blogging is to figure out exactly what you want to do from the start.

Personally, I knew from the moment I started doing political blogging that I wanted to make a living at it one day and I worked at it that way. If it meant staying up until 2 AM to get out posts when I had to get up at 5:30 AM for work, I did it. If it meant posting something inbetween being so sick that I was puking my guts out, I did it. Technically, it was a hobby for me back then, too.

On the other hand, if it’s just a hobby and you don’t care if anybody reads you or not, it almost doesn’t matter what you do.

But, if you want to get read, even by a fairly small audience, you need to have a certain level of consistency over a long period of time. Even if you want to eventually have, let’s say 1000 readers, you need to post SOMETHING, pretty much every day M-F. Maybe if you’re an incredible talent, like a Mark Steyn or Mickey Kaus, you can get by without pumping out new material every day, but people like that are rare.

Trying to fill a niche isn’t the worst idea in the world either. If I were starting from scratch today and nobody knew who I was, I’d try to come at blogging from a different angle than most people. My goal would be to put together a blog that wasn’t like anything else that was out there and if it didn’t work, I’d change directions.

Hope that helps a bit.