As you may know, I’ve only just begun this blog a few days ago. Still I have already learned a whole bunch of important things about blogging – by blogging.
Now I’m running over a couple of them. I plan to have this as a weekly regular (listing each week’s important lessons by the end of the week), so stay tuned, I’m sure that there’s more to come.
1. Bloggers are really-really nice people
When you start blogging, expect the first week to be busy. Extremely busy. You’ll have to play around with templates, establish your blog, watch out for all the technical details, and you’ll have to put a huge effort into planning the content as well. On the other hand, you’ll need to start networking with other people from your niche, let alone fellow-bloggers from outside your niche.
This first week was enough only to make a couple of first contacts with fellow bloggers, and I have to tell you that, I was simply amazed how nice they all turned out to be. It seems to me that people, who end up being serious in blogging, have an awful lot in common (which is, obviously both a part of the reason and a part of the result).
I’m pretty sure that we share the same values (or a lot of them) with Jenny Wallace, for example, as we are exploring the pros and cons of social media sites, and I hope to learn a lot from friendly and helpful pros, like Ben Barden, Easton Ellsworth or Yan Susanto. I guess, we really would enjoy a chat over a beer, it’s just that we happen to have an ocean between us with most of them. Still I expect to have lots of fun in this community.
2. Google Reader is not only inevitable but it’s getting better
I’ve been a Google Reader user for a while now, but I noticed only now that it became more user-friendly and even more useful than it used to be.
The new function I enjoy the most is that you don’t have to go to the “Manage Subscriptions” section in order to organize your feeds into folders, which in reality used to be a pain in the ass. I’m exploring new blogs and new feeds, subscribing to a lot of them nowadays (to much more than the 11 crucially important feeds I listed in one of my previous post), and it’s now really made easy to keep them organized in folders with this improved function.
3. Yahoo tracks incoming links far better than Google
Searching link:www.mysite.com is not a function that works particularly good in Google. Yahoo’s Site Explorer on the other hand, handles incoming links way better and in a more subtle way than Google does.
Tracking your incoming links or that of others’ is very important if you want to know a certain niche really well, but I’m not going into details right now. It’s just interesting that, for this task, I’ll prefer to use Yahoo from now on.
4. I really have to take the trouble and check out what the heck this StumbleUpon is
I’ve already mentioned that we share the interest with Jenny Wallace on exploring social bookmarking sites, and both of us bounced back from StumbleUpon, as it was way too complicated to digest, and I decided to postpone my StumbleUpon adventure for later, more relaxed times.
Then, after posting my list on the 11 must have feeds on Friday I was stunned to be flooded by StumbleUpon visitors. At the moment I have no idea how my site got there (I guess it was referred to or submitted by someone), how the visitors pick my site, or anything, but these are questions I will have to answer in the shortest time possible.
What about you? What are the most important things or ideas you learned this week? Feel free to leave a comment, and don’t forget to StumbleUpon my site if you happen to know what that means 
cheers,
Zsolt