This topic has been on my to do list for months because it is something that so many people ask me, almost everyone asks me how I found the confidence to blog. In the community that I am part of at Wealthy Affiliate I have also had a lot of members there tell me that they are so nervous to put themselves out there.
So I will just tell you how I see things and how I got to where I am with my confidence with blogging. I didn’t start out all confident and sure of myself and to be honest I am not always sure of myself every day now. There are times when I write a post and I just don’t feel right about it so I can’t push that button to publish it.
I am also human after all and blogging is really putting yourself out there into the world in quite a big way.
In fact the very first blog posts I published on my mommy blog were not written by me! My mommy blog actually started off as an online baby store and I wanted to publish blog posts on my website because I was trying to figure out how to draw in traffic to my website.
I had heard that publishing blog posts was a great way to go. I was too nervous to actually put anything out there so I asked other people to write guest posts for me. That was a lot of hard work since I didn’t even know where to start.
After a little while I decided to share my birth story with my first baby on my website and it went fine. In fact it went quite well and I got some good feedback.
This was the beginning of getting my confidence to blog. I put myself out there and I took the plunge.
Since then I have published over 500 posts on my mommy blog, most of them written by me and some are guest posts. I closed my online store to start blogging full time and I also launched this blog as well as another blog about my recovery from addiction and alcoholism.
I have now been blogging full time for over a year and here’s what I have to say about finding the confidence to blog:
Just Get Started Blogging
Your first post probably won’t be great, but each and every time you publish a post you will learn something new, whether it be some new SEO skills that will help your website rank better or being able to write a more engaging post for your readers.
There is no way to learn what you need to learn without writing anything. You will find your confidence as you go along and you will get better and better at blogging which in turn will also build your self confidence.
Yes you will make mistakes along the way, and you will learn from them.
Write About Something You Love
Find your passion and follow it. If you feel passionate about something it will come through in your writing. Your readers will pick up on this and will start engaging with you, probably because you will be attracting people with the same interests.
When this starts happening it gets even more fun and interesting and it will also add to building up your confidence.
Always Be True To Yourself
I often found myself thinking what do my readers want to hear and how should I phrase something to impress them. This is not the way to go, that is trying to be someone else. Trying to please my readers is no fun for me and do you know what the result is? Some people will like the person I am trying to be… and some people won’t.
So what is the point in that?
I would rather not think about what people want to hear and write what I need to say. When I do this the people that like my blog will follow the real me and the people that don’t like me really don’t like me and that is fine, they can go and find someone else’s blog to read. Someone that is a good match for their tastes.
I am not going to please everyone and if I choose to blog and to put myself out there I do need to put my elephant skin on.
The result of doing this, of just being completely comfortable with myself and being true to me is that I have found higher levels of engagement on my blogs. Most of it really positive and some of it has really helped me to toughen up.
