Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

I’ve often wondered how some of the top bloggers started out. How did Darren Rowse, John Chow, Rand Fishkin, and Jeremy Shoemaker cut their teeth? How about today’s rising stars: up-and-comers like Courtney Tuttle, ….

Are their current sites (the ones we know so well) their first ventures into the world of blogging? Probably not, but how they went about raising their young blog—from a newborn without a single inbound link, into a site that hundreds of thousands of people visit on a daily basis—intrigues me! And if you’re interested in building a successful blogging business, it should intrigue you to! I want to know everything about them. I want to know:

• What did their first post look like?
• Did they "wing-it" or did they have an iron-clad business plan written in stone before they dared touch the blogging keyboard for the first time?
• Did they struggle with their blog’s identity up front, or did they choose a niche’ and stick to it?
• What was their first big break?
• What kept them going past their first big break?
• Did they falter, and why?
  
• Were there spikes in their popularity? Troughs?
• What were the keys to their success in maintaining and building on a solid readership base?
• Will the up-and-comers continue their rise to the top? How? Why?

I suspect that many of them started out something like me. Struggling a bit at first to find their voice in the world. Trying to determine their Blog’s identity and to find the balance between blogging about what you love, blogging about things that other people want to read, and blogging about what makes money. But enough of what I suspect…let’s find out! The collective wisdom of the Internet is out there waiting for us to take a peek.

This is the first post in a series of case studies about what it takes to succeed in the blogging world. Stay tuned as we uncover the secrets of the worlds most successful blogs together!

Update - check out the series here:

• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts
• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts (Round 2)
• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts (Round 3)