Lee LeFever of Common Craft has a great post on his experiences in getting his Plain English series of videos on social media up and running. One thing he and his wife learned in the process was that you should solve problems as they come up, rather than overwhelming yourself with trying to fix everything before you even start.

Here's the lesson from our experience: If you're about to start something new, don't spend weeks trying to make the first attempt perfect. Get started as quickly as possible and learn as you go. Tinker, experiment and look for the big things you can tackle as you go. Solve problems when they need to be solved and you won't feel as overwhelmed by all the things that could be fixed.

Made me think about how many people don't get started with blogging because they're worried about making a mistake. As I've said before, you WILL make mistakes, but that's part of the learning.

What Lee found was each iteration of work helped them to focus on fixing different things. In the first video, they were just trying to tell a story, so there was much less focus on production values. The next time they saw that the audio needed work, so they fixed that. Then they looked at lighting. The point is that if they'd tried to get everything perfect before they even started, they probably would have just not made anything at all. Which would have been a shame for everyone, as their videos are a real treasure.

Even more interestingly, the first one, on RSS in Plain English, is a classic and their highest ranking video to date. That's because they focused on content first and then went back and worried about the rest of it later.

To me, there are some good lessons about blogging in this:

• Aim first for great content, presented in a compelling way. That's what will grab people's attention. If there's nothing worth reading, then a beautiful design will get you nowhere.
  

• Keep looking at your work and fixing new things as you go along. This is something I've learned in the 31 Day Blogging Challenge. For a long time I focused on trying to produce good content (with more or less success). In the challenge, I started to look at the details of things, like design and building an audience through other means. These made sense for me to look at once I was comfortable with the process of just getting content on my blog. If I'd started with this, I think that I would have paid a lot less attention to actual writing.

• Don't be held back by your need to create the "perfect" blog. You can be endlessly stalled in the design and planning phase if you let yourself. I think that the best way to get good at blogging is to just start doing it. As Lee says, you tinker and experiment as you go along. It's really the only way that you're going to make it happen because reading about it and watching what other people do just won't get you there.

I know that we all fear making a mistake (and by the way, I still want to hear about yours), but the reality is, when you're doing great stuff and learning as you go, I don't think many people notice. So it's better to just jump in.

Photo via Mr. Yaelz