As a young tech editor myself and founder of TechXav, today I’ll relate to you guys the main reasons why most students/kids/teenagers “shoo” away from professional blogging. I’ve started blogging since June last year as an amateur without any knowledge or experience about the social web such as Facebook and Twitter. Without any cash, I created a free Blogger hosted blog and wrote articles encircling around the social web. Once in a while, I would review web apps which I think are beneficial for tech users out there. A few months later, the number of daily visitors began to increase rapidly. All thanks to “Web Hosting Secrets Revealed”, I’ve managed to sign up for a .com domain name and a premium web hosting plan. On February 8 2009, TechXav was born.
Kids especially teenagers are ambitious. They want to gain popularity using the power of the world wide web when they are still young. Many of them head to professional blogging and hope to garner millions of readers monthly. Currently, there aren’t any kid bloggers on the web who are able to achieve that nearly impossible feat by starting from scratch. Based on my observation and personal experience, I’ve compiled the ‘5 Reasons Why Most Kids Say “NO!” to Professional Blogging’. Enjoy!
1. Cash-Strapped
This is one of the main reasons why most kids say “NO!” when it comes to professional blogging even though they might have a strong passion and interest. To almost all adults, forking out US$100 a year to purchase a decent domain name and web hosting subscription isn’t a big deal after all. However, from a child’s perspective, it costs a bomb! Because of this issue, many kid bloggers gave up blogging. How about using a complimentary blogging service such as Blogger or Typepad? Frankly speaking, it’s pretty tough to garner tons of potential readers as most of us have a mindset instilled in our minds that Blogger-hosted blogs are ‘unprofessional’ no matter how rich and interesting the content are.
You may argue that parents are able to help kids pay for these premium services. However, in my own opinion, I don’t think they are willing to spend their hard-earned money on such ‘useless’ stuff. Probably, some of them simply can’t trust the abilities of their children and are worried that they might give up half-way through.
2. Inability to Write Well
I can confidently say that blogging has indeed helped me a lot in improving my writing skills. In school, I’m able to write well in both narrative and argumentative essays by including some vivid descriptions and bombastic words. However, students only focus on their abilities or talents instead of the advantages blogging offers. They are just worried that adults with high education will mock at their poor writing skills. As a result, this will lead to confusion and hence losing ‘sticky’ readers. Well, I personally feel that they should be more optimistic and work hard despite the negative comments.
For example, my friend and one of the co-editors of Techxav, Zhou Tong isn’t fluent at speaking English and writes articles filled with grammatical errors in the beginning. Gradually, his English has improved tremendously as compared to a few months ago. He’s actually a Chinese national and is now on a scholarship to study in Singapore.
3. Distractions & Not Enough Time
There’s no doubt that almost all the popular blogs out there on the Internet are managed by adults instead of kids or students. Why? They have many things to juggle. Schooling has already played a huge role in their precious 24-hr cycles and sometimes supplementary classes and sports add up to the load. As a result, they don’t have any much time left to focus on professional blogging which requires lots of energy, time, motivation and luck to build up a profitable blog.
My fellow friends and I are all students and it’s pretty impossible to update on a frequent basis if we work in solo. That’s why bringing the talents together into one place will reduce our burden. If we choose to go in separate paths and develop our own tech blogs, not only it’ll spark off competition, but also making it tough to penetrate into the professional blogging industry and challenge those tech-savvy adults.
4. Lack of Motivation & Perseverance
Without any motivation and perseverance to strive for the better, only mediocre work is being produced and sometimes we are on the verge of giving up our interests and aspirations. Another important issue most kid bloggers faced is that they lack the essential motivation and passion needed when it comes to professional blogging. Despite having high goals and dreams, they aren’t able to achieve success because they gave up halfway through for certain reasons.
For example, one of my friends simply designed a blog theme and signed up for a domain name but unfortunately he gave up after realizing that generating ideas for blog posts is relatively difficult. Hence, he scraped it off and move on to another interest.
5. Lack of Knowledge
Yes, I must agree to the fact that most kids in today’s advanced world are indeed tech-savvy. It’s a common sight to see students interacting and communicating with their friends on social networking platforms such as Facebook and on IMs like MSN. Despite the fact that they know how to surf the web for research and leisure purposes, but there are still many things which a large majority of teenagers don’t know about. As a result, it’s quite impossible to target the tech-savvy adults by getting their attention with excellent content encirling around the world wide web. In school, practically no one uses Twitter.
I’ll list down and elaborate on the reasons why kids don’t use Twitter within the next few days. So stay tuned!