Why you can't lose when your blog is new

On Saturday, I did some ocean swim training with a guy who is getting ready for the Ironman triathlon next month. He's much younger and a hundred times fitter than me, but he dislikes the swim phase of the event the most. It's not just the swimming either - he (and this is quite common) doesn't really like swimming in the ocean because of "what's down there."

My last words to him as we entered the water were:

"Remember, you can't win the event on the swim phase, but you can lose it."

And we got our heads down and started out.

Swimming for a couple of miles always give me great thinking time, and those last words were echoing in my mind as I ploughed along in the swell. Typically, I started to relate them to blogging, and I realised blogging is almost the exact opposite.

"You can't lose as a blogger in the early phases, but you sure can once you're established."

Let me elaborate - when you first start out, you can pretty much do anything you want, because nobody is reading your blog anyway. You can write off-topic posts, you can be as controversial as you like.

Above all you can make mistakes!

So make them! Just get started...

And here's the point of this post: Too often, new and learning bloggers will hesitate to do anything and allow themselves to get stuck in the "trying to be perfect" trap before they even get started with their blogs, never mind when it comes to experimenting with new ideas and new topics.

My message is don't worry about it, get the blog started, try every single media available and start to see what works and what doesn't - all the time perfecting your own skills as a writer, a presenter, a commenter and a business person.

Don't wait to do things until you've "established an audience."

Let's face it, if you make a major mistake, and lose half your readership after a week, it's easy to recover when that only means 12 people.

And the opposite is true to. Once you have a few thousand readers, it can really hurt if you start losing them because you've suddenly gone off at a tangent, or you decide to try video posts and make a big mess of them. I've seen some established "stars" recently lose a lot of their shine in exactly this way.

Get started now, try everything and get your mistakes out of the way. Don't wait until it's too late.

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