I played baseball for most of my youth. I started playing softball in Cub Scouts when I was 8, I think, then moved on to Little League (including Pony League and Colt League as I got a little older), and finally high school. My dad coached several of my teams when I was younger, and one of his favorite sayings was “Practice Makes Perfect.” It was true then, and it’s true now. It was true about baseball, and it’s true about anything and everything. Even blogging.
Learning the Fundamentals
In my first few years of my baseball career, all of our practices were about teaching us The Fundamentals of the game: throwing, hitting, catching, running the bases. There were a lot of drills and repetition. We’d play catch for a while, then take grounders, all the while learning how to stay down on the ball and watch it all the way into our glove. Step with your opposite foot, and follow through with the throw. Our coaches pounded this into us day after day after day until it was second nature.
I’m quickly finding that the same coaching principles hold true for blogging. Before you get yourself overwhelmed with everything it takes to keep a blog running, just focus on the basics at the beginning. Get your blog set up with a theme (doesn’t have to be anything fancy,) start posting on a regular basis, and respond to your commenters.
Get yourself into the habit of writing and creating content. In a recent post at ProBlogger.net, Darren Rowse wrote about planning the next steps for your blog. He set up a calendar detailing what he would do and when. You could use a similar approach to get yourself into the habit of posting on a regular basis. It’s crucial for you to be consistent with your content if you expect your readers to be consistent visitors.
If you find yourself struggling for content, you could try using Theme Days as a sort of safety net for generating content. These could easily be incorporated into your blogging calendar.
Learn From The Professionals
As I started getting into junior high and high school baseball, our coaches spent less and less time on The Fundamentals. At that age, everyone on the team already had well over five years of experience and practice; if we didn’t have mastery over The Fundamentals by then, we wouldn’t be on the team. So instead of spending all of our time fielding grounders, we’d work on the more subtle aspects of the game. We’d learn how to steal bases. Pitchers would learn how to pick people off of first base. We’d spend a half hour or an hour watching professional players; how they swing the bat, how they throw, how they adjust their position on the field for different batters… things like that.
Once you feel comfortable with The Fundamentals of blogging, you can move on to more advanced aspects. Once you’ve found your blog’s voice and are comfortable with the direction of the content you’re generating, then you can spend more time on things like fancifying your theme and experimenting with video, audio, etc.
At this point, you should start paying closer attention to the professionals in your niche/topic. Just as we watched video of Tony Gwynn to learn how a Hall of Famer swings a bat, you can watch the professional bloggers in your niche to see how they run their blog. Take notes, stalk them on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or wherever else you can find them.
The old adage may say that practice makes perfect, but you’ll never truly be perfect. You’ll make mistakes, you’ll do things that won’t be as successful as you’d like them, and you might tick people off. Anything less than success is just a lesson in disguise.
