What I Learned Starting My Newest Blog

The post What I Learned From Starting My New Blog first appeared on ProBlogger.

What I learned when I started my last blog

For the past seven months, I've been doing weekly assignments on a new blog called Find Your Spark.

My goal is to write a quick blog post every week for 52 weeks about helping people "find their spark" (and help me find mine too).

In this post, I've decided to share some of the things I've learned (and re-learned) from doing this challenge.

1. I liked starting new things.

Even though I love ProBlogger and Digital Photography School (my main blog), it was great to get back to writing about something I was passionate about.

2. Presence of "Challenge".

(I have a clear intention to write a weekly post throughout the year) it really encouraged me and helped me continue my mission.

3. I really enjoyed using the Ghost blogging platform.

While I usually encourage new bloggers to get started on whatever platform they blog on, Ghost is a hosted service. there is something quite liberating about tackling the technicalities to start something new. I don't think I can do this project on my server, with my own design, etc. If I had to, I wouldn't start. When I started, I decided that I wouldn't spend a lot of time "customizing" the design or features, but would spend 99% of my time creating content. I think it paid off.

Ghost not only provides you with a blogging platform, but also a newsletter. It's great to be able to click "Publish" and know that a new post is automatically emailed to the newsletter.
While I don't make money doing what I do, you can also get paid membership tiers to deliver premium content to paying subscribers, which is pretty cool.
Even though Ghost is new, it's good to see that they are continuing to develop the platform. In recent months they have added comments, new stats / views, viewer comments, etc. added new features including

To learn more about Ghost, click here (reference link).

4. I really enjoyed the process of researching, gathering ideas and re-creating content

I've been experimenting with different styles of content over the past 29 weeks (different lengths, content selection, citations, etc.) and love the pace of one weighted post per week. I may have gone longer / deeper into the content than I expected when I started the challenge, but I really enjoyed the long approach.

I have chosen to report what I have learned rather than sound like an expert on this blog. These audios have served me well in the past, but especially with the topics I will cover (which I believe limits personal growth), I feel them essential.

5. Starting from scratch is difficult.

I've forgotten how difficult it is to spend so much time and energy creating content that I heard deadly silence after hitting the publish button. It's hard to start from scratch by building an audience and then grabbing that audience's attention.

Although I write primarily for my own growth, I have probably taken for granted the wonderful community that I have grown in my other blogs over the years.

I suspect that with my approach of putting all my efforts into writing, I was short-sighted in the early years of promoting content, as I did with previous blogs. I think we need to change this approach.

6. I'm glad I thought about the topics before starting the test.

Before starting, I used mind mapping software to create 52 topics to write about over the course of a year. I have since come up with other ideas and discarded some of the original ideas, but it has been very helpful to have this idea bank when I haven't been inspired to write for a few weeks or so. I have been traveling with my family for several weeks. This is a podcast episode I recorded about using mind maps in your blogs.

Overall, the challenge has been a very rewarding process for me so far. I am learning so much about blogging and the topics I write about.

For those who want to follow, the new blog is at https://find-your-spark.ghost.io/.

If you want to write a blog, I recommend that you sign up for the complete free guide to creating a blog course.