Are you ready to start your blogging business?

This is a guest post from Andrew Rondeau at www.webuildyourblog.com where he covers all the aspects of starting your own blog. If you are interested in a guest post on this blog contact us

We all learn differently and at different speeds.

Some of us pick things up straight away, others take more time and are, perhaps, more cautious.

Some of us learn new things by reading, others by viewing and some from the actual doing.

No matter how we learn or how fast we learn, we all go through specific stages of the learning curve.

You may be new to blogging. You may have been blogging for several years.

But no matter what stage you are at, you have to go through certain learning stages if you want to increase your knowledge further.

For instance, you may wish to set-up your own blog using WordPress. You can easily register a domain name, you know how to set up the hosting but you struggle to copy the WordPress files to your host account. Then you are concerned and not too sure about what WordPress plugins to use.

Of course, all the information you need is available on-line and you go looking and searching and eventually find out what to do.

Psychologists and experts say there are 4 stages we go through when learning a new subject and they are known as:

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

While starting a blog, you will have to inadvertently go through these motions before reaping a rich harvest!

Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence

This happens when you enter an alien territory. You may be an absolute stranger to the Internet and blogging is obviously just a word for you. You are not even aware of its implications. You may regard yourself then to be unconsciously incompetent about blogging. When in this stage, you don’t even know how much you don’t know.

So during this stage, you first have to be aware of what you don’t know, and accept that you don’t know it. That can be hard to accept for some people.

But when you start researching and investigating, you suddenly become aware of the vastness of the subject. You become conscious about how much you don’t know and quickly move onto the next stage.

The vast majority of people will automatically move onto stage 2.

Stage 2: Conscious incompetence

You are at this stage when you are mindful of how a blog helps your online income, credibility and marketability. You still cannot make head or tail about what blogging is all about, why do people use blog as a marketing strategy and how they use it? What is the process of advertising your blog and getting it adequate publicity and traffic? How even seemingly unofficial and friendly blog sites generate revenue and lastly, how to create a blog?

After some research, you realize that there is a lot to this blogging lark.

This is when you have to make the big decision. Do you give up or do you decide to learn and carry on?

Of course, you could decide to ‘master’ certain aspects of blogging and make the decision to hire other experts or outsource. That’s your choice but fundamentally you make the crucial decision to carry on or give up.

If you decide to carry on, over time and in certain aspects you eventually move onto stage 3.

Stage 3: Conscious competence

So you have started your blog, done some research on a few famous ones; their style of interaction, design and the whole infrastructure.

You start getting hits, visitors and, perhaps, a little income.

You get the drift of how affiliate marketing will help your site.

You give back-links of your blog to some serious sites.

You are beginning to feel comfortable in certain fields of blogging. You learn to do things well and with little assistance.

You could, perhaps, teach others in many aspects of blogging.

You are however generally in the dark about how well you will succeed. You may try different actions on your blog. You become successful but realize that blogging is still not a natural process for you. You have to labor through.

This stage is called conscious competence.

Stage 4: Unconscious competence

After a great amount of time and practice of doing you know many of the different aspects of blogging like the back of your hand.

You start translating your inherent knowledge into great revenue.

You automatically know the exact sites you should connect with for your blog publicity.

You unconsciously create innovations to make your blog look great.

Your revenues begin to increase.

You have the instinct to create different themes for personal and official blogs. Your success and fame is a foregone conclusion.

Congratulate yourself that you just reached the stage of unconscious competence.

The final say

At first, when driving you may find clutch, gear and accelerator rather absurd. You finally reach a stage when you drive while talking to a passenger and don’t realize which of them is the secondary job?

That is the progress from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

Overall, the 4-stage model is a great way to decipher where people are with various skills and can be used to create educational products.

But how many bloggers could say they are in the “Unconscious Competence” stage?

I would say not many due to the fast changing world of the internet (and Google!).

Blog post image credits barnett