I wanted to have my own blog for a very long time. But I didn´t know, which content I can put there. I am not such a smart-ass and come up with great ideas every week, which are worth to share in a blog post. Do you feel the same way? What can you just blog about and other people might be interested in?
Well, obviously I was wrong – I am a smart-ass and can come up with new topics for my blog every week. (If they are good or not, that´s another discussion – we will see.) And I am pretty sure, you can do that as well. The only thing you need, is a kick start – that´s at least what got my blog up and running.
So now I made you curious, right? Kick start – what the heck is he talking about?
Well, let me tell you a short story, how this whole blogging stuff started for me, and at the end I will forward you to a great guy, who can teach you in just a few emails how to get your own blog up and running.
About podcasts and developer soft skills
When I go to work in the morning by bike (actually this doesn´t happen so often anymore, as I am a lazy bastard and mostly take the car), then I usually listen to some podcasts about software development stuff. This way it is really easy to keep up with the newest, cutting-edge technology in the software world. (I just created a note for myself to create a future blog post of “My list of top X podcasts for software geeks“, let me know if you have some good suggestions for me).
And recently I listened to an interview with John Sonmez on software engineering radio. This interview and his book “Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual” made me curious and so I looked at his website http://simpleprogrammer.com, where I (accidentally) stumbled over his free email course “Create a blog post to boost your career” – with the subtitle “Creating a blog was the single, most profitable thing I did for my career“.
Fortunately I signed up, just to have a look at what this is about – but to be honest, at the beginning I didn´t have any big expectations. The upcoming days and weeks I got emails from John with detailed instructions, how to find a theme of your blog, how to choose the domain, set up the blog itself and how to find topics. After that, I also did some digging of my own and found some great stuff to help me with starting a blog. I even found tools to help me write in different ways on this Quillbot Review that I was suggested to look at. Learning how to blog has been great so far!
Especially the part “how to find topics” was an amazing experience for me. If somebody tells you to sit down and brainstorm to find 50! topics (yes, f*ucking five zero) for your blog, then you would think that this is impossible – at least that was my first reaction.
By the way – just find 50 topics for your blog
But that´s exactly what Johnny-boy did! (Well, don´t call him Johnny-boy, he doesn´t like that). I was on the plane from Amsterdam to Innsbruck and I came up with 53! topics in not even 1 hour. Yes, 53 – exciting, he?
You can do it
If you are curious now, then I recommend to sign up for John´s blogging course. I actually strongly recommend to just give it a shot – even if you finally won´t find a topic (which is not so hard following his instructions) or you will get tired of blogging after a few weeks, you can just stop – no harm done. But if this course turns out the way it did for me, then you will thank John. I do – thank you, Johnny!
Here is the link again, where you can sign up for John´s free email course: http://devcareerboost.com/blog-course/
Let me know if you started the course as well and send me the link to your blog (in a mail or write a comment). I´m curious what you are going to write about.
Well, see you around. Take care and HabbediEhre!
