St. Louis Bloggers Guild

For me, it started around 2007. I had been a website developer for ten years, and had already dipped my toes in the proverbial waters with a technology/programming blog called Developers Workshop in 2001-02. (Remember it? I didn’t think so)  But I’d been kicking around the idea for some type of personal blog for years afterward.

At the time I was also maintaining a website advertising my website-building services and occasionally made the sporadic update on this and that, so I thought, “Why not? I’ll add my random thoughts to the front page.” Long story short, after coding some pages in PHP and setting up a MySQL database backend, my makeshift blog was ready for debut at ScottRobertsWeb.com.

From the offset I wanted the blog’s focus to be evenly split into three categories. The first would be technology, which would encompass everything from programming tips to interesting happenings in the world of computing. The second category would feature my indelible love for hot sauces and spicy food. The remaining 33 percent covered all other general topics, whether they are crazy photos, funny videos, politics or what exactly was inside of electric stuffed animals. It was beautiful – I had relatively unlimited freedom to blog about whatever I desired, just as long as it fit into one of the three buckets and there were an equal number of blog articles from the other two categories to balance everything out.

But, over time, the blog has evolved to cover spicy foods as the chief focus, though I do attempt to fill out the other two from time to time.

Creating Your Own Blog and Determining a Subject Matter

Enough about me. You may have a desire to start up your own blog or site, but don’t know the first clue of what it’s going to be about. Perhaps you’ve tossed around a couple of ideas but are unsure if any of them are winning themes that people will want to read about. Well, here are a few tips that may aid you in your decision.

- Go with what you know. Go with your passions, go with your expertise, go with your unique experiences. Believe it or not, you are an expert at something. We all are. It doesn’t matter what it is, but you’ve spent your life doing something that is useful or will be interesting to somebody. Everyone’s got a story.

- Go with something you can update frequently. I’ve seen a lot of blogs that were crammed with great content at the beginning, but peter out very quickly. Why? The author simply ran out of good subject matter. He or she was able to whip up intriguing, engrossing posts for the first few weeks or months but they weren’t able to sustain their run with fresh, new content. Whatever you decide to make your blog’s theme, make sure you can keeping it alive with ongoing updates.

- Before you type a single character of your first blog post, write down several potential topic titles. Do they seem to write themselves? Are all of the thoughts, ideas and paragraphs freely flowing and just begging to be typed out and placed into your blog software? And what’s more, do these initial topics spawn other thoughts of stories and article ideas? If so, you might have something solid you can sink your teeth into for many months to come.

And be aware – if you want to dive into topical or controversial topics, you better do your research first. Make sure you know your stuff and why you believe it, so have all your bases covered. If you’re thinking of entering the world of politics on your blog, be prepared to take your hits with critics’ slings and arrows. If you’re not thick-skinned, then perhaps you should stay with less contentious subjects.

- Go with something that YOU would like to read about. What would stimulate your interest? Have you thought, “If only someone wrote about such-and-such, now THAT would be a killer website.” Take it upon yourself to write about those topics!

Have you scoured the web and seen a void that needs filling, topic-wise? This could be your opportunity to rush in and gain a readership that’s dying for information about a particular subject.

Develop the skill of noticing the little things and recognizing the offbeat. Every guy and his dog can write about the mundanities of life, but if you can provide a fresh perspective and a one-of-a-kind spin that no one else can provide, you might be able to produce a winner.

There’s nothing wrong with having multiple topics and focuses on your blog, but be clean and consistent. Refer back to what I mentioned earlier about my blog. While it’s okay to sometimes go on random flights of fancy with your writing, a “throw stuff at the wall and hope it sticks” approach isn’t always best. Attempt to categorize topics and keep things neat and organized so that your readers don’t have to cut through what they consider to be weeds to get to the freshly-cut grass.

In all of this, remember that your blog has to come from you. You are the most important ingredient, and you are the key to making each post enjoyable to read. You don’t have to be a great writer, but just have the ability to effectively convey your thoughts and let your own personality shine through.