Your Role and Blogging Experience

As an entrepreneur you should be expecting to get your hands dirty in
building your new business. If you are partially or completely bootstrapping
the operation, this may mean taking the approach that hobby bloggers take
and doing pretty much everything yourself. But even if you plan to hire staff,
it’s still good to actively work in one or more of the roles in the business.
In particular, it’s a very good idea to have experience in the writing and
editing capacities. These are the pillars of blogging and knowing them
intimately is not only important should you be short-staffed, but it will also
help you with planning and strategy.
Beyond writing and editing, your role as entrepreneur is really to do
whatever is needed. This might mean high-level tasks like marketing,
accounting, monetization, and management. It will probably also include a
lot of strategy and set-up work. This book will guide you through the many
and varied tasks you will find yourself working on.
If there is one piece of advice I can give that will serve you well in building a
business in blogging, it is to get some experience as a blogger before you
commit money and resources to the project. Even if you are a horrible writer,
even if you aren’t sure what to write about, the experience is so useful that I
encourage you to do it anyway.
It’s very easy to get started, and the difficulties and questions you encounter
will make the following chapters much more useful and interesting. So if you
haven’t blogged before, pick a topic you are interested in and set aside a
few weeks to intensively blog on the subject, to do your best to get noticed,
and to learn about the mechanics of blogging.
At the end of this book is an appendix chapter (The Blog Basics Crash
Course) where you will find an absolute beginner’s guide to blogging,
covering setting up, common terminology, and many other basics. If you’ve
never blogged before, I can’t recommend enough reading through this and
starting your own blog while you plan your larger blog enterprise.