Our Mommyhood

By Alyson, Contributor, Common Sense, Dancing (@amlanders)

Hey! You’re new to blogging? Or newish? Me too! And here I am, on Our Mommyhood, writing about being new!

I began blogging as a way to find my creative self, do something l love (write), and record my memories and my life for all eternity.

Or something.

Actually, it’s part of my plan to live forever. So when I get hit by that bus, the children and loved ones have somewhere to go that is “my voice.” Evidence I was here. Deep, huh?

I’m still really new at this. Officially it’s been a year, but between August 2009 and February 2010, I really didn’t post anything — and what I did post I marked “private.” I finally went all-out public last spring. I don’t know much still, but here’s what I do know — a few things serious, a few things not:

Some days blogging feels like high school. (Particularly if you are combining your computer time with a healthy dose of Twitter. I’ll address Twitter some other time. My love affair with Twitter waxes and wanes.)

You go and read all these fabulous writers, observe witty comments, and wonder how you stick your toe into that “group.” It seems like everyone knows (and likes) each other already, and there’s no room for a newbie. NOT TRUE. Begin by commenting on blogs that you like – read regularly and comment regularly. You’ll be amazed at how quickly online relationships between commenters and authors spring up.

So just keep on keepin’ on. You may see discussions about finding your “tribe.” I don’t know how you feel about this word, but it makes me uncomfortable. It feels too clique-y to me, even though I’m sure that those tribal members don’t mean to make it so. I’m not a tribe person either so the thought that I need to find my tribe, join a tribe, or be worried because I haven’t found my tribe just serves to make me feel an outsider. My advice? Write, comment, repeat.

Join some online communities and find other opportunities to get yourself “out there”

I hope you’ve joined Our Mommyhood, and be sure to check out sites like BlogFrog or  SITS.  Also, watch the buttons in the sidebars on other sites that you like to read. Chances are they feature an online group, and you can join, too. Also, if you use WordPress.com, review the guidelines to be featured on Freshly Pressed, and adhere to them carefully. WordPress editors will put a post of yours on their Freshly Pressed front page and boy! traffic jumps up and you’ll make new friends.

Make some decisions about privacy.

Go on, make those decisions now before the horse is too far out of the barn. Are you going to use your real name? If you’re not, remember this when you set up a Twitter account, when you link to Facebook (if you link to Facebook), and when you comment on other sites.

Make some decisions about how much you’re going to say. Will you discuss your sex life? Will your mother-in-law be happy about that? Will your dad? Your teenager? Will you write about your mother-in-law? Your dad? Your teenager? Know before you go; once it’s out there, it’s out there.

Figure out how your blog works — go ahead and “rearrange the furniture.”

I’ll apologize ahead of time and tell you Blogger peeps out there that I am a WordPress gal and I can’t speak to much else.  As a beginner, you may not be self-hosted yet – domain name.com as opposed to blogname.wordpress.com – but this is a terrific way to learn a little before you jump into the deep end. Change your theme; even if you don’t publish it “for real,” you can mess around with all the themes on WordPress and preview your blog in any of them. You can learn a bit about headers, footers, sidebars, etc. I changed my theme a bunch of times before deciding on what I’ve got now. So go ahead, rearrange the furniture. Stub your toe, and learn where the coffee table goes best.

Don’t get let those other sites make you crazy; stop comparing.

I’ll confess now that I still compare my site, my writing, my stats and my self to others. Do yourself a favor: don’t. There are days you will wonder why you’re not as pretty/clean/flashy/established/funny/popular as the other blogs. You will start to check, to benchmark, to compare, but don’t do it! Circle yourself back to why you blog and stay focused on this personal “why.” I was at a small conference recently and I left a little down (see the first point, above). Some of the women were talking about a “down” day when they only had a couple of hundred hits. Um, huh? Some blogs’ down days are other blogs’ bonanzas. Remember: Write, comment, repeat.

While we’re on site hits, forget about stats.

It’s really nice of all these blog platforms to offer statistics information to you about who’s reading, when they’re reading, and how they’re reading. But it will make you nutty, alternatively despondent or euphoric, depending on what you find. My site’s hit graph looks like an EKG strip; a nice healthy one with peaks and valleys, but no flatline. This is good for a heart, but maddening for a blog author; let it go.

Another stat that I check but (mostly) ignore is the one that is about Incoming Links. The message here always says: This dashboard widget queries Google Blog Search so that when another blog links to your site it will show up here. It has found no incoming links… yet. It’s okay — there is no rush. Well gee, that’s good. It’s only been watching since February. I’m glad my stats widget is telling me it’s okay. I find validation from an inanimate object to be so soothing.

Write.

I blog less from a place of acquiring followers (Though that’d be nice) and more from place of recording my own history (Remember? Living forever here.). Decide why you blog: do you want to make money? Keep a journal? Get so popular, like one blogger I follow, that they’ll write a movie about you? As I said above, I write to record what’s going on. I don’t aspire to make money on this; I don’t want that pressure. So I write, comment, repeat.

So when you’ll see more established bloggers encourage us all to concentrate on providing great content, which will in turn drive readership, I say this: just write. Do your best writing, whatever the subject. No typos, spelling or grammar issues, no mistakes. Your.best.writing. Content? To me, that’s secondary in the sense that you can’t worry that your content won’t be interesting or compelling or funny or….Just write. Find your voice, write with authenticity and integrity. Good writing, like cream and helium balloons floats.

Who doesn’t love a balloon?

—–
Alyson is a SAHM mom to 4 children, although the “S” part of that is often a misnomer. She’s normally in the car, shuttling kids or their stuff between here and there. She likes reading good blogs, 70′s music, salty snacks as opposed to sugary (except brownies — give her a good fudgey brownie any time), and her Doodledogs. She is still trying figure out what the heck CSS and HTML can do for her, what actually happens when a blog “crashes” (and how to prevent it even if you don’t understand it), and the width of her sidebar(s). (Her blog sidebars, that is. Her personal sidebars are way wider than she’d like.) You can read more about her real and ridiculous life at Common Sense, Dancing.

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