I think I have been suffering from Blog Shyness since I started this blog on February 17th, 2009. Now for those of you who do not know me, I am new to blogs and the social networking scene. I am an eCommerce/SEO guy, so I am used to the impersonal product catalog sites with hundreds of products. I am used to looking at navigation layouts, conversion rates, cross selling and merchandising and not too much about talking about myself or showing any personally online at all.
I took the months of January and February and committed the months to learning more about blogs, social networking and how it would not only help my business, but also my eCommerce customers as well. I know.. I am at least 5 years late on this bandwagon, but hey… what can I say. I see the power of blogs and when done correctly I can see that would benefit any of my customers.
Since I started my blog I have a whopping 17 posts, 133 unique visitors and 2 pretty worthless comments which I am pretty sure might be SPAM, but I approved them anyway since I wanted to get some comments on my new blog. I have sat down at the computer dozens of times and started writing fancy tutorials or elaborate blog posts only to scrap them half way through finishing them because they were not perfect. Well, needless to say I was getting discouraged with the whole blog thing. It is hard to write fresh content every couple of days especially if I never finish anything I writing.
My last post was a couple weeks ago on how to change the tax rates in the ShopSite Software. I used a new video technique that I call “quick and dirty”. I got the idea from an online video course that I purchased from a professional blogger during my short educational period. He did much better and professional job on his video editing, but that is where the concept came from. It’s a screen capture of my computer with a small video of me in the corner. No editing and no changing the text, it is what it is, nothing fancy at all, but it serves the purpose of getting the information to the customer. I got pretty good response from this quick and dirty video tutorial. Then once again I again was unsuccessful at writing any posts that were worth publishing in my eyes. It is hard for me to press the publish button on writing that is quick and dirty.
So I started to think.. why is it so hard to write content for a blog?
I started to follow several blogs that where in online marketing, ecommerce, website type niche, some large and some small and I started to notice one thing in common. While all these blogs were basically in the same niche, I found myself reading a couple of them more than others. I assume this happens with almost everyone, you narrow down your online reading to a select few of your favorite websites or in this case blogs. Here is what I noticed after I looked a little deeper into the sites that I liked. I was reading the blogs that were less about selling products. I was less interested in the blogs with fully polished articles, I didn’t care for the ones that where well edited with nice photos on them and little personality. I liked the quick and dirty content, the unedited ramblings of people like me. Complete with misplaced commas and run on sentences! They just sounded more human to me. More like a discussion and less like a newspaper article.
Here is one article that really stuck with me from one of my new favorite bloggers David Risley (a professional blogger) If you are going to learn how to blog, you might as well learn from a professional blogger I guess. Don’t worry be crappy is the title of the post. It basically says don’t be too hard on your writing and just write content that you think your readers or customers will enjoy and then press the publish button and move onto the next blog post. Don’t worry about it and with each blog post just try to improve.
So that is what I am going to try to do on this blog. If you guys like it, let me know by leaving me a comment below. If you don’t like it then you can leave me a comment below. I have learned in my short blog existence that blog articles are not perfect and in most cases are not meant to be perfect. I am just giving you the quick and dirty unedited ramblings of an eCommerce guy with the occasional tutorial, product announcement or sales pitch thrown in.
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