It's Been A Year and Here Is What I Learned from Being a Blogger...

Last year, in September, I started one of the most important journeys of my life – this blog.

Honestly, it reminded me a trip through a gigantic field covered from sky to ground with smoky white fog. I had no idea where I was heading but I knew that I had to keep going. That was pretty much all I knew back then.

Today, I can hardly believe it has been a year, A WHOLE YEAR, since I did my first publication on this website. It still feels like it was just yesterday, you know.

But looking back, I can see how impactful and life-changing this year of blogging was for me.

How it all started?

As all the best things in my life, it all started with an idea. Well, a thought actually.

Why do not I start a blog? – I thought and sent a voicemail to a programming genius in our family.

In return, I received a list of things I had to do to start a blog and, well, it all seemed so complicated and hard and expensive,  that for a few weeks I got quiet about that idea.

A few weeks later, the desire to start a blog returned and I decided to look closely at that list.

I sent another voicemail and another and another till I finally understood the overall picture of starting a blog.

But understanding something does not necessary mean knowing how to do that something. And so for another few months, my idea of starting a blog grew quiet again. Till one morning I received a message with a detailed plan of how to create a blog from my programming genius.

Without him, this blog would not even exist. It took a little more than year for us to come to the version of the website I have today and considering my wild imagination and complete lack of knowledge in web-design, that year was hard for both of us.

Thanks to his patience and professionalism, we launched this blog in September, last year. And here is the first lesson I leant from staring a blog.

Alone you can do little, but there is no limitation to what can be done together.

Other lessons I learnt after my first year of blogging

It should be scary and it should be thrilling.

As I already said above, starting a blog is like a long trip through a gigantic field covered with thick smoky fog. You cannot see sky, nor can you see what is two steps ahead of you, and it is absolutely normal. As I love to repeat, the best things happen when moving ahead starts getting harder.

This became one of my mottos in life.

Consistency is the key.

Honestly, first half of the year when I started my blog I did not understand how important it was for my mental health to stay consistent with my publications. As a freedom loving artist, I thought I would write on my blog when I feel like it and well, that mindset brought a lot of stress and disappointment in my life.

Consistency is what helps me to keep my ideas organized and under control.

Being consistent does not mean limiting. It means creating so needed for the freedom of the artsy mind peace.

Blogging is a journey to yourself and not a mere project for others.

I must admit, it was the hardest lesson to learn. Because no matter how much I wanted my blog to be successful, I never felt the idea of writing only SEO optimized blog posts that aim to attract more readers from the searching engines, which meant my blog posts should be on specific topics with a specific structure, right for myself.

I wanted to write for people as much as I wanted to write for myself. I did not want my blog to be a commercial project of some sort. I wanted to share my experience, my thoughts, my life, my struggles, my failures and my wins, my writing, and pretty much anything I felt like sharing about my life.

I wanted it to be a cozy place for people to come.

I wanted it to be a second home for myself to come.

And though this kind of blogs are slower to grow, I believe that in this case, slow means personal progress and it is the most important thing for me.

Better done than perfect.

Um… well, as a perfectionist, this is still a straggle to me because honestly, out of 150 blog posts on my website, I feel that just few are kind of okay. But if I posted only perfect (seemingly only in my opinion) blog posts, my blog would not move from the dead zone ever.

So, even though I try to improve my writing style every day, I do follow this lesson and post blog posts even when I do not feel 100 % satisfied with it.

Why?

Because I have to be consistent and so, if time to publish a blog post comes and I have no time to work on the blog post some more or to write a completely new one, I go and publish it.

Unless it is a complete garbage, of course. But it happens rarely, really, really rarely.

If you are planning to start a blog, I hope you do this no matter how hard it might look for you.

And to sum up, I would like to thank my programming genius for a year of work he put into my idea of starting a blog. Because, if it was not for him, this blog would never exist.

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See you soon.