How to Start a Blog

Just write some words and hit publish. A paragraph like this is enough. In fact, I don’t even mind if you copy/paste this straight into your new blog (although attribution would be nice!).

Why do I think you can get away with something this simple, or this meta?

Because writing is hard work, and starting up a blog is hard. There’s a lot of mental energy that goes into trying to set up a blog, and, frankly, a lot of that mental energy is wasted.

The truth is:

• It doesn’t matter what background you choose.
• It doesn’t matter what font you choose.
• It doesn’t matter what domain name you choose.
• It doesn’t matter what hosting provider you choose.
• It doesn’t matter what you call the blog.
• And it doesn’t matter what you put in your first post.

None of these things matter, because nobody is going to read your blog for a while, and that means none of those decisions matter for a long time. What you have to do is write, and what most of us need to do is write a lot, if we want to get good at it, and especially if we want other people to read it.

I’ve written or helped write successful blogs in the past, and the early days were the same every time. Lots of writing, not a lot of reading. You have to get the ball rolling for a while before it becomes a Real Thing.

But why not play with all the trappings of the blog in advance? It’s fun to figure out the name. It’s fun to figure out the fonts you want to use. It’s interesting to comparison shop among all the hosting options out there these days. Right?

The problem is, you’ll drown in all that. I’ve been thinking about spinning up this new blog for years. Every time I think about it I get excited about all those trappings. Every time I start by playing with all the options. And every time, I end up spending my creative energy before I’ve written a single blog post.

“I’ll come back to it tomorrow,” I think to myself. But I never do.

So this time I’m just typing some words and hitting publish. The next step is to do that many more times, on a schedule, to get back in the habit. And then, finally, if all that happens, and people actually start reading this thing… I’ll spend some time picking fonts and colors, and try to think of a name for this thing.