I started to work with computers since I was a kid and as soon as Internet was available in my zone, and to my wallet, I was there connecting with a modem. But I had to wait until 2000 to decide to start some sort of personal presence online. I was a heavy email user before that time but I didn’t have a site, a domain. Social Media was a concept too far away in the future. It wasn’t until 2004 that I started a real personal website. I created some websites previously for clients but I didn’t think seriously to have my own. So in 2004 I started something like a blog that I created in PHP using text files. I had no time and not so much content to use a PHPNuke or some other sort of CMS. It was just an experiment. Later I stared using WordPress, and since that moment, I’m still a happy user of it.
Until that time, the idea of I-need-to-have-a-site wasn’t in my mind, like many of my colleges. It was more a sort of a geek-hobby than a real need, and the idea to build a profile and to have my personal history recorded in search engines was too far away… If I look at the past, I can see many mistakes and many good ideas. I hope this can help someone trying to start doing a personal site.

Let’s start with the mistakes.

Blogging

I didn’t have a clear target. A clear idea of what I wanted to do with a site. I didn’t even have the idea of building a profile as it is clear today. I just have the strong need to have a site, to have a domain that will be identified with myself so I can find new friends, make contacts and share ideas.

I cared too much about the design instead of the content. The enthusiasm of building a new page led me to think about colors, logo and background while the site was untouched for months. Content matters more than design.

Trying to follow strictly other bloggers recommendations. What works for some people doesn’t mean that will work for me. This was one of the more frustrating mistakes. Trying to follow exactly every recommendation was such a waste of time and resources. Just take other people recommendations as an advice, not as a rule to be followed. At the end I wasn’t satisfied with the results just because I was following the suggestions of someone that had a totally different personality and target than me. Don’t choose any guru, just listen, read a lot, and do what better fits with your needs.

Trying to write for everybody. That’s impossible. Everybody is different, I can’t write something that will like to every reader. Every blog has a public and I had to realize that I cannot make it attractive for everybody. This mistake led me to adapt, change and reorganize the content many times. Dropping posts, adding new ones that I was not really interested to write and so forth. It was a waste of time.

Waste to much time on statistics. I should made to myself these questions. Do I plan to earn money with my personal blog? Do I think that getting more and more visitors will really change my life in some way? Living from this blog was never my intention so why the hell I spent so much time checking the statistics? If you are not planning to live from your blog, just don’t waste your time checking how many people visit your site. Let it be…

About social networking…

Don’t try to get more followers. Social media is like physical interaction. Don’t try to be friend of everybody, it’s impossible. It’s a matter of time to get a real good number of followers/friends. If you try to “force” the process, maybe you will get soon a lot of followers and as soon as you get them, you will loose them. At the beginning people will start following you, and later, if they are not interested about what you say, they will eventually unfollow you. The same for friend based communities, like facebook. They won’t maybe delete you but they will ignore your posts, which is the same. The important is not the number but the quality, and a good quality follower is the one that really reads what you write and that really interact with you. If your blog becomes popular and the number of followers/friends increase dramatically that is a good sign, so don’t waste your time trying to increase numbers.

A good avatar matters. It matters as far as the avatar doesn’t consume too much of your time and resources. Choose something that match your personality. It doesn’t have to be your picture. I chose to put a clear picture of mine because It’s quite probable that I meet many of the people that I follow or follow me, so I want them to recognize me just in case we meet. But it’s not so important.

What I did right

Be yourself. Now I don’t care about the content, I don’t care if this fits with the main topic of this blog or not. This is a personal blog, not a specialized one. I just don’t care anymore. If you are going to write a blog of a specific topic, (I’m doing it for photography) of course you have to stick with it but for a personal site, where the main topic is what is happening around you, just be yourself. If you do that, you will attract people compatible with you who will like what you say. That’s the most valuable public for a personal site. Not the numbers but the quality.

Give more info about yourself. I realized that people was interested about the author of the blog, therefore they wanted to get more information about me. So putting a clear picture, a short and a log bio and some kind of resume is just refreshing for the reader. Just think about the fact that a reader of a personal blog is interested in the author and what’s going around him/her. Usually when I read somebody’s personal site I focus on his/her vision of the world and opinions, I want to know more about the author’s life and experiences. It’s like you are having a conversation with somebody you like.

After this time I just realized that it was quite easy to forget what was the real reason to start a personal blog: “share!” In case you want to do the same, I hope this helps you.