Blogging is a great way to share your ideas and to build up your portfolio. Writing also helps improve communication skills, as well. I’m really not that great in communication, especially in public speaking, so I decided to start writing. At first, I started a blog, though, I write rarely to a point that I forgot about it already. So I decided to look for ways that will help me write more consistently. Fortunately, I found this great free blogging course by John Sonmez from SimpleProgrammer.com. You can sign up for the course through this link. After you sign up, you’ll receive lessons through your email. Each lesson also has its own homework for which you’ll have an option to send it to John and he’ll gladly reply back with his comments.

I won’t go into the specific details of the lessons since it will be provided by the course. However, I’ll give you some information on what you’ll be getting in the course just to show you how it can really improve your writing, especially with consistency.

The lessons of the course will really help you a lot in writing blog posts consistently. The first lesson is about coming up with a theme for your blog (not the website’s theme, but what your blog is about). John suggests to pick a specific theme rather than a general one, and that your target is to be “the big fish in a small pond”.

The next lesson is about helping you create the website for your blog. Since Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform, the lesson teaches you to create a website using Wordpress. Since you want your website to be flexible as much as possible, John shows you how to host your own website and install the Wordpress CMS, rather than simply using Wordpress.com. If you’re a software developer and prefer to avoid payments for hosting, you can host your website through GitHub Pages. It can host your static site for free, but you can also build a blog type website using Jekyll, a static site generator, which GitHub Pages support out of the box.

After setting up your website, the following lessons will teach you some techniques on writing. The third lesson will help you come up with ideas on how to write. The technique is to start off with at least 50 topic ideas then choosing the top 3. Once you’ve crossed off enough topics and you’re left with 30 ideas, you should begin adding more ideas until you’re back up to 50. This way, you’ll always have a list of topics to write. You can use a software to help you keep track of your list such as Google Keep or Apple’s Reminders. In my case, I’ve used Microsoft OneNote to get free cross-platform syncing.

The fourth lesson, John teaches you to be consistent in writing, and committing to your writing schedule. He suggests to post at least once a week, however, you can always double this rate to jumpstart your writing schedule.

The next lesson’s topic is about getting traffic for your blog. I haven’t finished this course yet so you’ll have to sign up for the course to find out.

I haven’t set up my site to receive comments yet, so feel free to contact me through my email.

In case you’ve missed it, here’s the link for the course sign-up: http://devcareerboost.com/blog-course/