The History of My Blog and How It's Grown Over the Past Two Years: Starting from Scratch (Part 1)

I’ve written before about why I started my blog, a lot of the behind-the-scenes details about updates and upgrades to my blog, but I haven’t ever really documented the progress of my blog. For those of who you have been around from the very beginning (Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!), then this might seem a little redundant to you.

But over the past couple of months, I’ve started receiving emails from some of you who have blogs of your own and are interested in growing your blog and ask me the question: “How did you do it?”

I think a lot can be learned from hearing someone else’s story, so I figured I’d try to retrace my steps on this little blog of mine. For the record, I do still consider my blog to be rather small and still very much a work in progress. But that’s kind of been the story of it, all along. So we’ll start there…



Before starting Life Blessons, I’d had a couple of other blogs, as well, but they were more of your “Dear Diary,” look-at-my-life kind of stuff; nothing intentional, just random bits of information as it passed.

However, I did have some experience that was really helpful to me first starting out: In high school, I’d taken an HTML class, which I’d kept up over the years, making my own websites for fun as well as for my professional portfolio. (You can see my most recent example of that, here.)

Additionally, because I had that HTML experience, I was able to work on the websites of two different national magazines (Health.com and HOWdesign.com), not as a web designer but as an editor, overseeing and uploading the content. With that experience, I gained a stronger understanding of things like writing compelling titles for online content, linking within articles and using images to attract more readers.

When I first started noodling with the idea of starting this blog, I knew I wanted to approach it differently than anything I'd done in the past, both personally and professionally. I wanted to make it the kind of destination spot that other blogs had become for me: Ones that were filled with ever-evolving content, content that impacted my life.

One of the first things I did was start writing—ever before I even started the blog. I wanted to make sure that I had enough stuff to write about—and keep writing about—before I plunged into the world of blogging. For a few weeks, I wrote post after post, exploring ideas and realizing that there was a treasure trove of possibilities in this burgeoning blog. Once I saw that I could sustain the idea, I went to setting up my blog. (If you want to see more about why I chose to use Blogger as my blogging platform, you can read more about that here.)

That first step—of practicing blogging before I ever launched it—was a crucial one that I would recommend to anyone starting out with a blog. Because not only did it give me the motivation to continue with the blog, but it also gave me a safety net of having posts in the coffer for those times when writing inspiration was nowhere to be found. I still keep to this system today: I have dozens of posts sitting in my draft folder, just waiting to be posted. This gives me freedom in my writing: I can write when I feel inspired, not because I feel like I have to keep my blog up-to-date.

But then, even once you have the content, comes the task of getting people to read it. Even though I had a folder full of fodder and some technical expertise in my pocket, there was one crucial bit missing from the equation: I had no readers.

Click here to read Part 2 of this story about how I started my blog, where I look at some more specifics regarding what I did to grow my blog at the very beginning.

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