Aussie Bloggers

I’m relatively new to blogging having only started my own blog in September last year. It was through looking at other people’s blogs that my own desire to do the same was sparked.

I was nervous. Various questions ran through my head – Where and how do I start a blog? What would I write about? How much detail about my life do I use? Would anyone want to read my stories? Would my style of writing be up to scratch?

The questions of where and how do I start to blog were answered by looking around the blogs of other people that I knew. I picked the most familiar platform, started a blog, and spent a week playing with it before showing anyone what I had done. That week of play answered a lot of my “how” questions. I discovered that using a blogging platform is a bit like any other application that you will use online. It just takes some time, practice and patience to get used to how it works and learn your way around.

Of course, if I was new to blogging and starting a blog now, I would go to visit the Aussie Bloggers Forum where I would find a plethora of helpful people and handy advice to get me started on my merry blogging way!

All the other questions answered themselves after I asked myself a few questions.

What was I going to blog about? Well, my life. Things that happen to me and my family, my reactions to those things, my thoughts and my emotions.

How much detail was I going to use? No more than I would feel comfortable with someone I know in real life stumbling across it.

Would anyone want to read my rantings? Was my writing style going to be good enough? It doesn’t really matter. The thing is, you see, that I have always liked the idea of keeping a diary, but in practice it never worked for me. I am a seriously easily sidetrackable kind of person. I can’t begin to remember how many diaries I have started only to lose them, or miss a few days and not bother. Blogging, to me, was a last ditch attempt at diary keeping in a place that I regularly spent time and couldn’t possibly lose it.

Keeping a diary of things that happen in my world online is working for me. Knowing that other people may be reading what I’m writing about helps me to sort events/ideas & my reactions to events in my mind as I try to put them in a format that will make sense to the reader. As an added bonus the supportive comments of people who do read my blog are a nice little boost when dealing with difficult circumstances and a lovely addition to my own celebration of the good things.

So if you want to start a blog but don’t know where to start, have a look around. Check out other bloggers and the platforms that they are using. Go to the Aussie Bloggers Forum and ask some questions. Have a think about what you want to blog about and ask yourself some questions about it. Set something up, have a play, have a fiddle, start writing. You may just surprise yourself.