Don't Read This Blog: Tips, Theories, and Warnings for Becoming a Blogger

I am a blogger. 10 months ago, I wasn’t. This experience doesn’t make me an expert on the subject of blogging by any means, but more often than I would have expected, I’ve been asked for blogging advice. I thought I’d write this article to answer some of the common questions I get, and provide a few pointers and words of encouragement to those that are considering taking up blogging.

Start with Why

Blogging is a lot of work. You really shouldn’t do it, unless you have a clear and compelling reason why. I had several reasons that drove me to start. First, I had a friend of mine, Bert Anderson, who authors a very popular blog, First Time Mom, bug me repeatedly over the course of several years to start a blog. I always dismissed it, but that planted the seed. Second, I really like writing. When I went through graduate school, I read and wrote constantly. When I finished school I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop reading, and I kept that commitment. However, I found that I missed writing. My day-job doesn’t require that I do much writing, so I needed a creative outlet for this passion.

Find a Theme

This problem stopped me from blogging for a long time. I really couldn’t think of good theme to write about. Sure, I could come up with a few random great ideas for individual blog articles, but what overarching theme should go with? I thought of writing a technology industry analyst blog, but then I realized that there are a lot of people out there doing that, and they are a whole lot smarter and closer to the technology than I am. I thought about writing a general leadership blog, but again, I realized that’s totally saturated with big-name authors and high-profile leaders. Then one day it hit me. There’s just about no one out there writing about leadership contextualized for the enterprise technology field. That would be my Hedgehog Concept for this blog.

Another reason I felt good about this theme was because I was confident that I could go the distance with it. I wasn’t going to run out of ideas after a few articles. Over coffee and lunches, I often found myself giving leadership advice in the context of enterprise technology. What I was doing 1:1 could be scaled out to the masses.

To Monetize or Not?

There’s nothing wrong with blogging for money. I just really wanted to do it for free. That meant no website advertisements, product placements, affiliate links, or anything. That also meant that I had to do this on the cheap. The few expenses I bear for running this come out of my own pocket. It’s not the only way to go, but it’s the path I’ve chosen, and I’m sticking with it. This blog is my gift to you.

Build a Brand

They next hurdle to cross is “what the heck do I call this thing.” I iterated through this one a lot. zachhughes.com and all of its derivatives were already taken. Apparently, I have a common name. I thought about excluding my name from it and going with some combination of Tech or Technology and Leadership, but everything was either taken or too expensive. While I was in the middle of brainstorming this issue, I was reading an article from a popular cybersecurity journalist, Brian Krebs, whose website name is krebsonsecurity.com. That’s the moment zachonleadership.com was born.

Building and Hosting a Website

It’s ironic, really. I’ve spent my whole career building and running servers and data centers to host websites that handle billions of dollars in commercial transactions. However, I had absolutely no idea how to build and host a small, cheap, blog website. You’d think it would be similar, but it’s just not at all. I had to go to my non-techie friends to learn about Blue Host and WordPress. I’d like to give a shout-out to my buddy, Adam Wallschlaeger, for the tips and tricks to get me off the ground. Adam also gave me the idea of going to fiverr.com to get a decent and cheap logo for my blog.

Develop a Social Media Presence

I get very little readership from google searches. Almost all of it comes from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and my company’s internal Yammer site. I wrote an entire blog article on the subject of How to Build Your Personal Brand on Social Media. Check it out for more detail.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

Now for the real challenge: the voice in your head. What if no one reads it? Don’t worry, they won’t. What if I get writer’s block? You will because you’re a dummy. What if I come up with something charming, witty, brilliant, and amazing, and I’m the only one that thinks so? See previous answers. Can the fear of blogging failure kill me? Perhaps.

I found it helpful to at least acknowledge these fears at the onset, so they didn’t catch me by surprise later. It’s all very real, but it’s also all in your head. Try not to psych yourself out.

Make a Commitment

Before I published a single blog article, I made a commitment on exactly what I was going to do. I decided I was going to publish one new article per week for a year. 52 articles. I didn’t have 52 ideas when I made the commitment, but I figured they would come. I would publish every week, and not take a week off ever for that first year. I figured consistency was an important factor for establishing a readership. Why a year? Well, that should keep me from giving up too early and it’s hard to commit to something longer than that without knowing how it was going to go. A year seemed like the right duration for initial evaluation. In another two months, I’ll be reaching that mark and making that evaluation.

Tactically, to reach that weekly goal, I needed to have a few blog articles “in the bag.” For the most part, I write pretty close to the time I publish. Sometimes, I have very busy weeks. I also go on vacation with my family. That disrupts the weekly blogging cadence, so I draw from “the bag” of unpublished articles I wrote ahead of time. I find business trips and family road trips are great opportunities to refill “the bag.”

Find an Editor

Last but not least, I’d like to acknowledge and thank my editor and proof-reader: My wife, Wendy Hughes. I have pretty good grammar, but she has an especially sharp eye. There’s nothing like a second set of eyes to save you the embarrassment of bad grammar or confusing sentence structures. Everything you read, she’s read first. She always makes changes. Every time.

Those are my lessons learned so far. I’m not a blogging expert. Just like all of my other articles, this is my advice, practitioner to practitioner. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog of your own, perhaps this is the swift kick you need to make it happen. If there are any more experienced bloggers out there in my readership, feel free to offer me any advice you may have so I can make this blog even better.

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