Have You Broke Out of Your Blog Shell?

I spend a lot of time traveling the blogosphere, meeting other bloggers, reading posts and I guess you could say monitoring the competition. There is a lot of reasons I do this, the biggest of course being networking, which is important and vital to the success of you and your blog.

As part of my regular rounds I stopped off to see what Darren was up to the other day and he had written a short post titled Your First 10,000 Blog Posts are Always the Worst, which briefly touched on this subject. In the post he said:

Like anything - blogging is something that the majority of us are not brilliant at in our early days. I look back at some of the posts I wrote in my first year of blogging and shudder with embarrassment. The mistakes were spectacular and frequent.

As I go from blog to blog I have had the opportunity to notice a lot of things about how other bloggers work, what styles they tend to steer towards and so on. One of the things I have noticed that really stands out, is the progression each blogger makes over time. In other words by taking a quick look at some old posts and then the most recent ones you can really tell the difference, with just about every blogger I have come across.

I am sure that this change is attributed to a lot of different underlying issues, the most predominant being experience, and next is most likely interest. We all evolve to some extent as we continue our journey across the Internet, but how long does it take? When we start out with that first blog, there is undoubtedly a certain level of innocence and lack of knowledge, that encases us in a little shell, to hide from the bitter truth or maybe the criticism of our peers. For many people opening up to an audience is far from an easy task. And even though you may not write a “personal” blog, any blog is in fact a reflection of you as a person, that will surely be judged by others.

So what do you feel was the major turning point, that allowed you to break free from that shell, and become who you are today? Or maybe you haven’t broke free yet, what do you feel is holding you back, are you scared of what others think, or maybe unsure in your abilities as a writer?  I will leave you with these questions, and encourage you to offer your own answers in the comments below.