I’m sure you’ve seen the posts. You know the ones I mean. “Improve Your SEO” or “How to Get Readers and Keep Them!” or “How to Keep Loving Blogging”. They tell you how to fix your SEO so Google will love you and show you on the first page of search results. They tell you how to get readers and keep them coming back – usually by insisting upon your having social media. They tell you all the hard things about blogging and then tell you how to help keep those things from making you quit.
But there are things they don’t tell you. You won’t read any of these blogging gurus telling you that improving your SEO isn’t a guarantee that Google will love you and put you on the first page of search results for your keyword(s). They won’t tell you that getting readers takes time and effort – and if they do, they’ll tell you that you need social media to do it, which is a whole other ball of wax. They’ll tell you all the hard things about blogging, then give you tips that worked for them. But they don’t really acknowledge that everyone is different and that their tips might not work for you.
Blogging gurus love to tell you how to blog “the right way”. They tell you that you have to get a hosting account, preferably through their affiliate link, buy a domain name, and use self-hosted WordPress. They don’t consider that spending a bunch of money to start a blog you might not want to keep working on is kind of ridiculous, unless you’ve got money to waste. They also don’t seem to understand that, barring plagiarism, there’s no “right way” to blog.
But the biggest thing they don’t tell you is a lesson I learned on my own over years of blogging. At the end of the day, your blog is just that – yours. You can use whatever theme, colors, etc., you want to. You can write your posts in whatever style you want to. You can name your categories and tags however you want to. It’s YOUR blog.