I’ve been asked things like “how do you find time to blog?” and “how do you find things to blog about?” a few times lately…
Time
Let’s first tackle the topic of time.
I don’t actually keep track how long blogging takes me time in a week. I would estimate it at maybe a few hours tops, if we calculate only writing as time spent on blogging.
These days I can write a post pretty quickly, provided I have a topic. It’s really just a matter of getting used to writing things down in words. The more you write, the easier it becomes – the same as with any skill.
Of course, you could also count finding topics as time spent on blogging. This highly depends on what kind of a blog you’re writing. For example, if you’re writing about dogs, and you don’t really care or know about dogs, it may take some research to actually come up with anything.
Topics
I normally spend quite much time reading other programming related blogs, talking with people on IRC about programming, and actually hacking away at code. This is normal for me, and I enjoy it. This naturally translates into topics to blog about – maybe I wrote some interesting code or got an interesting idea while writing code, maybe I got an idea after reading someone elses blogpost, or maybe discussion on IRC sparked some thoughts – it all adds up.
Add to the actual time spent on doing things the fact that I’ve been programming for quite some time. This means that I can often see topics from a different perspective, which also helps.
I often write down notes about things I can write posts about. Right now, my topic-note has five topics, though they’re all quite big and complex, so I’m probably not going to use those five anytime soon, but they are there in case I feel like looking more into those things.
For starting bloggers, I think one problem is that they think their topic is not interesting, or they don’t have enough experience to talk about it.
While having expertise is helpful, it does not necessarily matter. There are always people who know less than you, and if you write your post in a tone which doesn’t claim you’re absolutely right, some nice person may even come and tell you how to improve what you just wrote about. I have probably written my share of posts which have mistakes in them.
What comes to topics being interesting, I think the only important thing is that you find it interesting. Despite that they claim every human being is unique, there’s definitely others who will be interested in reading your post. Maybe people will not find it now, but they probably will later on if you keep on writing interesting posts.
In closing
I’m not going to start spouting all the standard “10 ways to make your blog rule” type of things, but I’ll say one usual one: pick a schedule and stick to it, because that’s helped me I think.
In short, write about what you are interested in, and just write something as per your schedule. It doesn’t matter if you don’t really know what you’re going to write at first – maybe you just have a few short sentences – just write it down and publish it. I do that when I can’t think of anything else =)
Also, the short idea might expand into a bit larger one. This post you’re reading was initially just a short idea – basically the first sentence of the post and then some, but look what happened? Over a page of text!
You may also want to read my older post “should I start blogging”