How to Start a Blog Without Making the Mistakes I Did

If you haven’t heard yet, I launched my new website called the Resourceful Marketer on Sunday night. I wish this were a happy post to tell you how excited I am. I mean, I am excited, sort of. But I’m also very tired and very annoyed, because I did not want to start another blog when this one is finally seeing some success.

So here is the convoluted version of why I started my new blog, in the form of mistakes I made when starting this one:

I highlighted my age. Wait. I harped on it.

If you want to harp on your age and inexperience, it doesn’t get any better than declaring yourself a twentysomething or Gen Y blogger. I needn’t remind anyone that there is very real discrimination against young people in the workplace. It’s fine to pigeonhole yourself as “young and bright” when you first enter the workforce; but 3-5 years in, you’ll be begging for people to stop looking at you as “one of those millennials” and start taking you seriously.

Chuck Westbrook says it best: “Rather than trying to be the Penelope Trunk of Gen Y or the Gary Vaynerchuk of the next generation, the real accomplishment is to start showing up on ‘Best Bloggers’ lists, without generational qualifications.”

I agree. Growing into your profession means gaining respect as peers. Which is nearly impossible to do if you classify yourself as a Gen Y blogger.

I thought blogging was just a hobby.

Blogging is a wonderful hobby, don’t get me wrong. But look. When you build a blog of nearly 1,000 subscribers, you don’t have a hobby anymore. You have something that you should take more seriously, because you might be able to take it further.

When you first start a blog, you have no idea how popular you might get, so you should plan ahead 5 years just in case. Okay. Don’t really plan that far, but at least consider where you might be 5 years from now. Because now that I have a moderately successful blog, I can’t do anything with it because I messed up when I chose my focus on Gen Y personal development, which morphed into just personal with a dash of Gen Y. Which brings me to my next point.

I wrote about twentysomething careers instead of my career interests.

First, the Gen Y train has left the station. The market for more bloggers on this topic is small, the B2B business is going to already-established Gen Y companies, and even the bloggers who started the Gen Y train are struggling to make money from it. So please do not start a blog about twentysomethings in the workplace, or any other place. It’s done.

Second, I think twentysomethings get very mixed up about blogging being good for your career. It is, but mostly when you write about topics that are relevant to your field. (You know, establishing yourself as an “expert” in your industry, and all that.)

Sure you can learn a lot about yourself and grow as a person, personal development, yada yada, from any blog you start. But if you want to take a long-term view, you shouldn’t write about the ins and outs of your actual career unless you want to be a career coach or human resources professional.

I didn’t blog on my personal domain.

I am so thankful I bought http://monicaobrien.com when I did. Because it wasn’t available one week, and then it was the next and I snatched it. And now I’m using it to write about marketing, because the domain “Twenty Set” just doesn’t make sense for that topic, and I want to be fair to my original subscribers here.

But there’s more. If you want people to know you, no matter what you write about or what your career is, you should be blogging at yourname.com. On blogs, people buy you more than your topic. And besides, it’s likely that as a twentysomething you don’t know what you want to do and will change careers often, and the one thing that is fairly constant is your name.

I have two blogs! Don’t have two blogs. Just don’t.

I will try to keep up with Twenty Set and grow Resourceful Marketer. But to be realistic, it is very difficult to grow even one blog to 1,000 subscribers, and trying to manage two blogs will probably be a nightmare.

Plan ahead so you don’t ever need two blogs! There are a million problems that come with it. Aside from having double the work, you have the trouble of building a following on two separate domains, from subscribers, to links, to content, to comments, to traffic. The thought of starting a second blog made me so crazy that I put it off for 5 months, hoping to find another solution. I kicked myself when I realized that I would be so far by now if I’d been building my second blog for the last 5 months instead of going nuts.

I hope you won’t make the mistakes I made. Thanks to everyone for supporting Twenty Set thus far, and a special thanks to those who have helped me launch the Resourceful Marketer (I am especially happy to finally have something to put on my business cards).

As you may have guessed, Twenty Set will officially become my personal blog, if it hasn’t already. The writing style and content of this blog will stay the same, so keep reading and check out Resourceful Marketer if you ever want more. I hope the topics I cover on Resourceful Marketer will peak the interest of some of my longtime supporters of this blog too!