Some of them were professional bloggers while others were more casual in their occupation. All of them, however, seemed to take a pretty laid-back approach to putting their columns together.

In retrospect I wish that I had received some good blogging advice before I started off. Starting a blog is not as easy as I had thought.

First of all, you have to deal with layout issues. One of the hard facts about Internet blogging is that people are not going to read your blog unless you make it interesting looking. A webpage that looks completely dull and has bad layout is going to make eyes glaze over no matter what you have to say.

Don’t get me wrong  there are some blogs with very simple layouts and still get quite a few readers. But even with these weblogs, the people who made them took some time to think about the design of the site.

Another area I could have used blogging advice on was getting hits. My personal blog was also part of my business. I was sort of combining multiple features into it. On the one hand, I wanted a blog that I could use as a semi public journal. I could use it to inform my friends about what I was up to in my life.

On the other hand, however, I wanted to be able to inform people of developments in my business. I run a business out of my home, and there’s a lot of overlap between my professional and personal life. Good blogging advice would have helped me to create a webpage that was both informative for my clients and interesting for my friends, and one that would attract a good number of hits from Google searches.

Even without looking at a blogging guide, I did manage to figure it out eventually. It was slow going, and I think I wasted some time that would have been better spent on something else. Nonetheless, live and learn as they say. Next time, I will start with expert advice!

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging advice, Internet, internet blogging