The hardest thing about starting your new blog is filling out the About page. The About page is your prompt to explain why the reader is here, on your site. I had to make it up when I began because I didn’t know — for me, the act of starting a blog was a kind of soul-excavation that can lead anywhere or nowhere. I committed myself to doing it every day for a year, thinking something magical would happen at the end.

“Learning to see in the dark” is the caption I chose for the header on my page. You get that area to help people understand what’s going on, what they should expect. It’s important, because your visitors are customers and you want them to come back. It should be clear what you’re about.

At the essence of it, blogging is a way to open yourself to the world and connect. Some choose to follow, click a Like button, comment, or just read. The blogger gets the satisfaction of putting something out there and touching someone with it, which builds a type of community — a thumbnail of a guy in China becomes a real person, to me. There are real people in my house but thousands of other people who become real on my computer, this way.

So the thousands of real people, the millions of real people, are at the edges of your laptop universe and you create the best facsimile of yourself to attract their attention, a kind of costume party in the Internet cosmos of infinity, coupled with the casino quality of statistics and chance, which makes winners out of losers and addicts out of us all.

Over the last year, friends have said they’ve gotten to know me better through my blog, and I have too. I thought something magical would happen at the end, but maybe it was at the start.

Categories: inspiration, writing

Tags: bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, identity, introspection, social media, Wordpress, writing