How Did I Get Started Blogging?

Sharon Hurley Hall wants to know how we all got started blogging. To that end, she has started a neat little round robin over at her blog. It ends on August 17th and she’s calling it “Blogging Start.” Considering, I got started blogging in the same group as Sharon, I am pleased to put in my contribution. But, first, the rules:

She writes:

The theme: getting our blogging start. I don’t know about you, but I’m always fascinated to hear how others got started in blogging, so I’m looking forward to reading all the entries.

The rules are simple: write a post with this theme on your blog, include a link to this post and leave the link to your post in the comments section. Check back regularly and visit everyone’s posts to share some comment love.

So, Sharon, here’s to you…

The WritingUp Social Experiment

As you well know, Sharon, I got started writing on a group called WritingUp.com. What a drama that was! It was like a soap opera complete with surprise blogs, conspiracy, accusations, overnight alliances, and a final, earth-shattering, and emotional finale. It really was like a episode of Survivor: Blogging On WritingUp, don’t you agree? Sharon was one of the better bloggers there, and I often visited her blog there. It was a group of bloggers who were told they could write and earn Adsense money based on a shared profit model. Well, it appeared to work well at the start and some people did profit from it, but what happened was that we became a close-knit group of writers who were getting far more valuable information on how to write online there, then the money from Adsense was worth. So, originally, I was attracted to the money, but stayed because the writers and the networking was phenomenal! I wrote about all kinds of things, but generally with a spiritual bent to them as I like to perceive the deep spiritual meanings in every day things.

When Success Means Failure

The blog was very successful, but unfortunately the site itself became so successful that the owner got in trouble with Google and some other people in the legal arena and one day we all logged in and the site was permanently DOWN. Everybody’s blogs were trashed. It was really a blow to many of us and we did try to regroup, but never quite as well as we had done there. Many of us were smarting from the loss of our readership, our networking, our blogs! All that hard work – down the tubes! Since then, I’ve tried other blogging sites, but WordPress seems stable even though, it’s a good idea to backup all your entries anyways, in case it changes ownership, becomes a paid site, or the Internet crashes. God knows! I would never have suspected such a huge site would ever be disabled permanently and it’s made me a bit paranoid about online sites. But, it did provide me with valuable experience on what works, what doesn’t work, and how important networking AND keeping offline copies of your work and network contacts is, especially when you don’t have direct email contacts not through the third-party site you’re in (the case with WritingUp).

What I Took Away

Before that experience, I would have never thought I was capable of writing a post that had thousands of views on it. It became perfectly obvious that it can be done, even if it isn’t that common for somebody first starting to blog. I learned about Adsense, keywords, blog reviews, popular topics, how to write a blog post, and how to network online. We also learned how to “tag team” there, a tactic that bloggers use to increase their reads. I see it a lot with financial blogs and I will eventually join a blog carnival when I have the time. I also made some great freelance writing contacts there that eventually went on to pay me good money for my work. So, that’s it! Thanks for telling me about your writing project.

If others want to join this writing project, just click on the button above that Sharon has provided, and don’t forget to add a comment here too, so I can visit it also.