How to be a better blogger if you don’t have a blog to begin?

There’s a few great(long) entries floating around the otaku-lifestyle blogosphere(or let’s just name it OLB in short) that talks about being a better blogger. But i’m pretty sure there are many who have been lurking and have yet to unleash the writer in them. So now that you know how to become better and more responsible bloggers, we’re going to focus on how do you actually start blogging.

Yes today you will read my grandfather tale of how i started blogging. So lets begin, grab a pack of chips and maybe a long playlist. I can get boring and probably you’ll spot some typos here and there.

Personally i started off from blogspot.com at that time(2004?) when i first started blogging, i blogged about my normal life. It got really boring and of course i stopped blogging. Also i didn’t liked the way the platform is made. Sure the html controls is pretty relax but every tom, dick and harry has those fuck up themes and you have to click on so many frigging buttom just to read what the heck they wrote.But no one can blame them, blogging was supposed to be an online, searchable personal diary(in a way). I too had such theme at a point of time and i wanted to shoot myself, it was so pathetically user unfriendly!!

Of course currently blogs isn’t just a tool for diary-shit, in fact blogs are a way to earn money and there’s a thousand-and-one ways to use your blog to earn money. But of course i’m not into earning money but clicking on my adsense will help me reach the USD$100 faster, right now i’m still at USD$8.45. So a long, long way for me till i can cash out and actually let this blog of mine pay for itself rather than me forking out to pay for hosting. But if you’re not clicking i don’t really care either, lol the irony.

Anyway i “progressed” to using Livejorunal which was because a few friends of my was using this service and it sounded more cool to be using the same service as they do as opposed to me alone using Blogspot. See the peer pressure influence? Of course this was also yet another personal-diary shit which lasted a bit longer than my older accounts at blogspot. Although the switch was due to peer pressure influence i actually found LJ to be better than blogspot and it was loading faster at that time(there was an explosion of blogspot accounts) but i gave up that platform as i grew tired of blogging. So things to note, blogging entirely on your own personal life things will get really boring if you have a short attention span and you don’t go around saving the world.

I gave up reading on blogs too as i felt like i was probing too deep into someone’s life(my friends in this case) and i looked like a bloody stalker reading some stranger’s blog that i haven’t even met in real life. Then i started to be active in forums, namely Vr-forums. Its a forum on computer hardwares and stuff as i was learning how to assemble a pc of my own. I became a regular and i was creating and replying to threads in the forum in a very regular basis. Foruming is great, replies is fast and there’s a lot of topics to talk about and a lot of topics to talk back. It was all great till i found the joy again in reading blog and also i knew too many people in the forum and i needed some space to be alone.

I started to read blogs introduced by members of the forum and i started with this. I then branch out into reading more blogs of this genre. Also this sort of blog is something i loved and that is anime. So i began to devour blogs after blogs that devote themselves to summarize and give their own point of view regarding the animes they watched. It was really interesting to google for maybe “Sasuke X sasuke” and see thousands of results linking to so many different blogs. But for the record i don’t do yaoi.

There’s so many great blogs out there why bother creating my own when i don’t even have the time to read all? But there was this One blog that inspired me to write and that otaku is getting married soon. What i am today is very much due to his presence in the internet, thank you very much uncle-zero!!!. He made me realised how interesting an otaku lifestyle could be if you put it into words. The otaku life is wayyy more interesting than my normal personal life. Things are happening daily from that new anime on tv, that old manga that you dug up, that girl which did Nia cosplay and that new gunpla you assembled. Basically everything and anything that excites a geek or otaku, it is blog worthy and people(otaku, geek, etc) actually read. So my addiction to share my side of my own otaku life began last year.

I embarked on this journey to find new blogging platforms and i found wordpress or rather it was getting popular and many people was talking about so i jumped on the speed wagon. I got hooked on blogging ever since july 2007. This was the first time in my whole blogging history that people actually discussed/comment about what you wrote and it felt great. There was actually an interaction going on! Blogging isn’t about keeping a personal diary anymore, it is about the sharing of information and of course making more money.

Dannychoo.com was also a great influence in how i write. Even though zero’s blog inspired me to talk about my otaku lifestyle and how i blew all my money on cd/dvd/mangas/etc, dannychoo showed me the side of life that otaku probably may have missed. Yes and that is the actual real life and real things that are happening around you. I realised that i have been too obessed in a closed reality. I misinterpreted zero’s blog. But i didn’t stopped blogging, i read the older archives of zero’s blog and realised he too talked about his real life, his ups and downs and of course his otaku lifestyle is still his main focus. I knew i had to stopped this stupid act and get myself back together. I cut down on spendings and spent more time as a normal person but i was still an otaku nonetheless. Of course there were many external influences that turned me into being obessed but i wouldn’t talked about it today.

I’m not really that ashamed to be an otaku, i like my hobby and i like it a lot to talk about it and to want people to know that i’m into it. Thats just 3 months into blogging on wordpress and i felt i needed something new. Creating yet-another-account on wordpress will create many more incarnations of my old blogspot shadows so i decided to get my own hosting plan on 3ix.com and my platform of choice of course is wordpress it has been a year plus  since i signed up for a hosting plan and using this current address and blog and i’ve paid almost S$100(USD$70-ish) already.

Nowadays i talk about a lot of things. Otaku lifestyle, food, how-my-photography-suck-due-to-lack-of-equipments, bitch about things and people, talked about my army life and misc other things that i read on the net or seen somewhere and i thought i should share it. I think this is how blogging should be if you’re not trying to earn money on blogging.

Anyways if you’re too bitched about paying for your own host there’s actually a few great few hosters out there that can give you a personal address(to an extend) and they let you mange your blog the way you want. Great hosts like Dasaku.net, Animeblogger.net and Xepher.net are just a few great few hosters that you can turn to if you need external hosts if free accounts on blogspot , LJ and wordpress can’t statisfy you. Also it is more cool to be less mainstream.

Now that you know where you can crave out a piece of internet space, lets talk about grabbing attention.

• You exchange links or just link people to your blog
• You sign up for services like otaku.fm, animeNano, animeblogger antenna and grab more attention
• You talk about unique things or just brag about the newest toy in town that you’ve purchased and show it off
• Commenting on others blog and also remember to provide a link back to your own blog
• Writing article and linking similar ones or unsimilar ones to your own blog
• There are probably more ways but this is all i can think off becos’ this are what i’ve done and am doing.

Now that you know where to start, how to grab attention, i’m going to tell you some tools that you can use. Tools like Photo/picture hosting sites are a great example to use on top of your blogging platforms.

• Photobucket, 1gb storage and 25gb bandwidth for free account, 10gb storage and unmetered bandwidth if you pay, you can share hell lot of pictures!
• Flickr, 100mb upload limit/per month for free account, unlimited bandwidth and storage if you pay. You can learn a lot more about photography and show off a lot more on this photo sharing network
• Twitter, if you have only 140 characters to say.
• Purchi blurbs on dannychoo.com, somewhat like twitter.
• Forums that you once surfed are great information gathering places
• Google and other search engines
• RSS reader like Google reader to keep yourself updated on whats happening instead of visiting every website.
• DeviantART , share your works of art and also link back to your own blog
• Imeem.com or Last.FM to share your music and of course link back to your own blog
• Again there’re probably others out there but i’m running out of attention towards this post

So we’ve reached the end of this post and this is the part i hate most, the ending. Don’t really have any things else to say other than a big thanks for putting up with my rant, information, brag, story, etc and etc and this is one of the rare times i spent more writing than being distracted. I wanted to purely talked about where to find blog hosts but i felt i should include my own side of story(see the dannychoo influence?). I felt great digging out some of my old past and sharing it with people. It takes off some burden for some reason. Anyway if you have been a lurker and you think you should start a blog, why not?

Go out smell the flowers and come back again to share it! It is nothing to be ashame to be an otaku if you can step out being obessed and strike a balance between life and hobby. I was once obessed and now i’ve stepped out. Stop the rat race to be new, to get the newest, latest e-penis boosting plastics. Yes this is the age of information sharing and yes this is the age to strike balance in things you do and yes this is a very long post and looks like i’m trying means to further lengthen it. So i will end it here, K THX BAI!!!

No really i kid you. Once again i thank you all for reading and if there’s something amiss or something you would like to talk about leave a comment or better, write an article yourself and link it back to this post so i can go read and troll in your blog.

Remember life isn’t all about being buried in your hobby. Theres so much more to life and i have dannychoo and Zero to thank and also this blog is my reflection of my own personal and otaku lifestyle. I think i just found my resolution.