An exercise to get started blogging

I have many friends that want to start blogging or have started several times and haven’t been able to keep up with it. Blogging is a difficult thing to find a rhythm with, but what I hear most is that there is difficulty in finding enough things to say.

The fact is, everyone has interesting thoughts on topics, the trick is figuring out how to get them out of your mind and onto the page in a non-intimidating manner. So here is an exercise you can try to kick off your blogging experience.

1. Pick a topic that you’re interested in. For this example, let’s choose marketing.

2. Pick a weekly cadence. I would say no less than three posts in a week if you really want to try this. Let’s go with three/week.

3. Pick a subject within your topic. We’ve chosen marketing as our topic, so let’s choose mobile marketing as the subject.

4. Break the subject down into six parts (2 x # of posts per week). This is where you might struggle, but its not that hard. To keep with the current example, let’s go with:

a) Mobile marketing is necessary for companies today.

b) Mobile can be broken down into “mobile web” and “mobile apps”.

c) Mobile web is important for…

d) Mobile apps are important for…

e) 5 examples of great mobile web and app experiences

f) How “mobile” is transitioning to “wearable”

5. Write two paragraphs on each of these topics.

6. Congrats. You just created six blog posts.

Most people new to blogging would have tried to write a 12 paragraph blog post with all of the above ideas jammed in there. Blogs are not thesis papers or college term papers! You can stretch your thoughts out over time if you like and explore a topic at your leisure. It’s really not that hard when you think of it like this.

I chose mobile marketing but you can choose any topic. Interested in photography? You can come up with six paragraphs a week on photography then.

The trick with blogging is to break it down into something you can handle. If its a daunting task every time you sit down, you’ll never get past the first few posts and at best you’ll have a twice-a-month blog.

Good luck. Btw, I wrote this in 14 minutes.