If I Could Turn Back Time…

No, this isn’t going to be a post about Cher and fish-net stockings, it’ll be a metapost about what I would’ve done differently if I had to start my blog all over again. I’d have to say I’ve been pretty lucky and I haven’t made as many mistakes as I could’ve but most of my mistakes have been with respect to interaction with other bloggers - reading their sites, communicating with them, etc…

1. Name of my blog: Blueprint for Financial Prosperity is just too long of a name for a blog, I wish I spent a little more than ten minutes thinking up a name. While I do basically layout a blueprint, my blueprint towards prosperity… certainly a name with fewer than 129304823094823 letters would’ve been better.

2. Contact other bloggers sooner: JLP was the first personal finance blogger I ever sent an email to and that was quite possibly a month after I started blogging. A month! If I started over, I would’ve emailed every single blogger I knew just to say hello and ask them anything to open up a dialogue. Back then there weren’t things like MBN Forums where bloggers in the personal finance/investing/money niche could connect and share tips and ideas but if there were I’d be the most prolific member out there… in blogging it’s all about communicating with your peers and learning as much as you can.

3. Subscribed to blogs via RSS sooner: The first time I discovered RSS, I used some application installed on my PC instead of ubiquotous web based app like Bloglines - wow what a mistake. Plus, I didn’t even use RSS often in the beginning to keep up with what was going on in the world, what people were talking about, what was hot at the time. What a mistake… now I periodically read close to two hundred feeds. Granted, I don’t hit up each feed every single day but I do peek in at least once a week. There is so much stuff out there that visiting each site is impossible.

I’m sure there are many others that I can think of but none as big as the three I’ve just listed. I think the most valuable thing about blogging is it lets you connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t have.