My New Year’s Resolution

As most bloggers would say December is the slowest month of the year when it comes to updating blogs. If so then I am guilty, as you can see this is just my second post this month. There were just too many distractions that were hard to ignore. One that really knocked me hard this month was the “holiday blues” though I got over with it now. Thank God!

Now it’s time to pay attention to my blog. With a year coming to a close, it’s time to reassess our goals once again. Are we making a headway or are we still stuck in a maze and starting to get frustrated? Either way, it’s time to pause for awhile and re-evaluate our goal plan. So we can decide wisely on how to tackle the new challenges ahead of us.

 Recently, I had a dilemma with my blog that I must decide whether to continue moving forward with the same strategy or to abandon the plan that does not work and start all anew. In other words, I had the thought of deleting my blog and starting all over again. I became impatient with my blog. I got tired of changing the design so many times and I can't still get the look that I wanted. I became discourage that after blogging for several months now, I am still talking to myself and my stat still remains the same.

I started this journey with no background on writing and no knowledge on how to start a blog, I am not a web savvy and so on. All I had was a strong determination to learn. I did learn a lot through research, reading and watching YouTube. Nobody taught me or help me set up my blog, I did it all by myself. Though I am still a newbie and still need to learn a lot more, I should be happy with my accomplishments.

Blogging is hard work, especially if you're aiming to become successful in the blogosphere. There are so many things to learn particularly when you are new. It can be overwhelming sometimes.  Though I am aware that there are some easy ways if you are willing to spend money into it, such as paying for a blog design, buying quality contents, buying ads to promote your blog and get more traffic, etc. That is if you want an easy and quick route to blogging. But you will surely miss the fun and challenges that go with it and this will  not guarantee you success either.

I am more interested in doing it on my own. The skills that I've gained along the way are more important. I've  realized that writing can be learned, but I can't grow as a blogger by writing alone. The cause of my frustration is that I lack some other skills to be able to move forward as a blogger.

A blog expert, Steve Pavlina said that in order to be successful as a blogger, one should need to be a web savvy. You don’t necessarily have to be a computer programmer but must understand the basics of the technical aspects of blogging. The list below are variety of web technologies that we need to be familiar with.

I have the desire on learning them one by one though I keep putting the tasks aside, so in 2012, as my new year’s resolution I will make this my priority.

• blog publishing software
  
• HTML/CSS
  
• blog comments and comment spam
  
• RSS/syndication
  
• feed aggregators
  
• Pings
  
• trackbacks
  
• full vs. partial feeds
  
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
  
• search engines
  
• search engine optimization (SEO)
  
• page rank
  
• social bookmarking
  
• tagging
  
• contextual advertising
  
• affiliate programs
  
• traffic statistics

optional:

• email
  
• podcasting
  
• instant messaging
  
• PHP or other web scripting languages