How much time did you spend on research before you started your blog?

[Rene]

Probably this question aims for the money makers in blogging.

What did you do to gain knowledge about blogging? What resources did you read and do you still read? How much time do you invest per day or week to stay up to date?

Some information about my blogging career so far

Before I started my blog Depressionsblog.com - it is about clinical depression and coping strategies - in November 2006 (it is in German, sorry folks ) I think I spend around at least 200 hours only on blogging topics. I red about 100+ blogs concerning this topic. At this time I wasn´t blogging only “leaching” information.

Blog strategies

This way I found a common denominator regarding blog strategies. As time passed I was sure to get into the blogging scene. I was suddenly very passionate about blogging and had a vision about my blog. It seemed to be a lot of fun hard work. I knew what I wanted and then I finally build my blog.

Hard work

However I didn´t expect blogging to be that complex and time demanding. Marketing took and still takes many time as well as building the blog and tweaking it. I gained so much experience and still there is so much still to come.

With each posting and blog I red – including Steve Pavlinas – I felt more and more energized. I have clear goals regarding my blog. Drive focus and persistence. That´s it for me.

Tech savvyness

I think – as Steve wrote – you need to be tech savvy – indeed very tech savvy. Otherwise I couldn´t go that far with my blogging experience. Fortunately I have a long history regarding programming computers. I started with the Commodore VC 20, C64, Amiga, PC and so on.

Resume

Nowadays I spend at least one hour on reading certain blogs about blogging every day. I structured the time I spend developing my blog around these four main topics:

• Writing postings
• Tweaking
• Marketing
• Keeping an eye on changes in the “blogosphere”

Question

What do you do to to build your blog? How many time do you invest? What are you willing to sacrifice in exchange for your blog experience?

Regards,

René

(Excuse my imperfect English )