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Baby Boomer Blogging-Were You Born a Blogger?

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This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series baby boomer blogging

If you are a baby boomer blogger reading this answer just one question. Were you born a blogger? I was not born a blogger. Sure if my mom had me tested back in the early fifties they may have detected a “blog” gene. But genetic research as not, to my knowledge, been able to find that DNA relationship. Yet, many of us are baby boomers and we blog? Why? How did it start?

Ok, here is my story. Once upon a time I had someone create a website for me. Why? Because as a speaker I went to enough workshops that said, “Create a website and put the url on your business card. Include articles, products and the kinds of topics you deal with and audiences you address. Oh, and don’t forget to put a current picture up and not one showing you 20 years ago.

Well, I did that, not once but twice. Both were wonderful sites done in Dreamweaver. That is one of the finest website development packages around but the learning curve is steep. So although I knew how to change pages, create pages there was so much more to learn. I could not fix my files and much more. I became increasingly frustrated.

Remember, I am a speaker, stand up, talk, engage, get creative tell jokes but not do blogging. That sounded lonely, tedious and too hard!

Then one day I attended an NSA, (National Speakers Asssociation) conference and was introduced to this thing called blogging. I purchased the CD and listened to it over and over again in my car.Although, I did not use the same blogging platform as the speaker, I decided to create my blog using Blogger.

How did I learn Blogger?
I took an online tutorial course with VTC. I would look at the video, stop and do they said, then start the vidoe again and continue. I had a blog up and running in no time! I still had my static site but I had a blog up on presentation skills. I taught my husband and he put one up on art. What was also cool was this same  video site had a lot of free  videos you could learn from before you started paying. They also had loads of videos we could not find in the stores. Video tutorials on just about anything so we signed up for a year so we could also dip our toes in stuff like Photoshop, etc.

I started looking at the tutorials on WordPress.But at that time the installing was oh so complex. I was not ready to deal with creating databases and other stuff you had to do if you did not have a host that made it simple.

Are you ready to share your story yet?

Next, How we traveled to WordPress.org during hot date nights.

Baby Boomer Blogging-Were You Born a Blogger Pt.2

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This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series baby boomer blogging

One of the real reasons I started this series was to capture other stories from baby boomer bloggers. But now I am really thinking about those things that motivated me to blog.

  • I wanted to become a professional blogger.
  • I wanted to earn passive income from blogging and other internet strategies.
  • I wanted to be able to add to my pension.
  • I wanted to be able to help others in need via blogging.
  • I wanted to be around more and not on the road speaking away from my mom since I am the only child and I am her” assisted living.”
  • I wanted to help my husband sell his artwork online

I STILL WANT THO KEEP THESE DREAMS SO I HAVE MADE THEM GOALS

Ray and I decided to take an eight week webinar training in the evenings. These were great date nights. We would eat dinner then sit at the dinner table around the lap top or downstairs around the desk top with speakers turned high as we listened to Jeannette Cates talk about starting a business online.

Now we were already primed by other internet gurus we like and admire. But this series by Cates promised to help us set up our own website! I admit I thought it was going to be a static site and I would learn more about Dreamweaver. But before we knew it we had jumped into deep water and was swimming with WordPress.org. Oh my, that was the program that looked so hard on the VTC training that I decided it was far easier to stick with Blogger.

But it was too late. We were assigned to create this WordPress.org site and host it. We did it. We are glad we did.

Later as, as time went on, we went deeper with WordPress.org with the guidence of my friend Cathy Perkins, the infamous WordPress Wizard.

Ray and I were not born bloggers. But as baby boomers we were determined to learn. We now have many blogs and still learning.

What about you? What is your blogging story? Please, Please share. You can post as a comment or just email the story to me using rhspeak(at)aol.com

If we get enough stories we will publish them in an ebook to share with others