The First Blog I Started Five Years Ago

I work with a guy who likes to say I’ve been blogging longer than anyone. That’s obviously not anywhere close to being true, but I did start my first WordPress blog in 2004. (No, it wasn’t this newly created site with twenty posts.) Five years of blogging is a long time for the Internet world, especially for Indianapolis bloggers. So what did I do and how did I do it?

I wanted a website of my own. At work I had started creating micro sites, ecommerce sites, and continuing to develop our main website; but, it was for work. I wanted to start a website for myself. It couldn’t be a regular static HTML website, it had to be something cool and dynamic so I could easily update it and impress myself. I tried Joomla, Drupal and then chose WordPress.

But what would the website be about? What topic, niche or interest would I write about? I have tons of interests and could have talked about everything, but I wanted to focus on something that I was interested in and that could possibly make money. I decided to create a community website for the town I live in, Fishers, Indiana.

The website started out very slow, probably because I was just copying and pasting news articles from the Town of Fishers website and local news sources. Not very interesting, and not news that visitors couldn’t get from anywhere else. Then I began writing “real articles” . . . like a real newspaper reporter! I would walk around with my mini tape recorder and interview the local girl attempting to earn her black belt in Tae Kwon Do, the best chef of bread sticks in town, or the local Police Officer who unfortunately had breast cancer to hopefully raise awareness and donations.

I also started to take stances about particular issues. Whether it was the annexation of a nearby community, or the latest Town Council meeting, I was providing opinionated commentary about the latest local issues. That’s when the site really took off and started to receive a lot of comments.

Before I knew it, I was approached by a local businessman who wanted to purchase my website and make me the Associate Publisher of a print monthly newsletter that would be directly mailed to 12,000 homes. What a better chance to have fun with my writing and Internet skills, and maybe help out the town that I live in? It was a fun ride while it lasted, but my contract got changed and the rest is history.

What’s the point to this post? That I have been blogging and using WordPress for over five years? Maybe . . . but this is what you should take from it:

Original content is King. This is what got me highly ranked in the search engines for terms like “Fishers Indiana” and receiving many visits despite any advertising.

Take a stance. This is what you need to do to get comments. If you don’t take a stance, you won’t get many comments. The more comments, the more activity on your website, the more reason for others to comment, and the more content that the search engines will index. More, more, more = good.

Write what you know / love. I knew the Town of Fishers, because I lived there, but I ended up loving the town. The more you learn about the history, people and government the more passionate you usually are. So if you already love the topic, great. If you know the topic well, you’ll probably end up having fun writing about it.

Which leads to the most important part about blogging: have fun.