Someone asked me the other day what skills I wished I had to enhance my blogging.
I was able to answer them very quickly as most of them are glaringly obvious to me and probably those around me. The gaps in my web skill set are mainly technical. Blog and Graphic Design, Blog Set up, Coding etc.
While I’ve learned so much over the three years since I started (I still remember the day I had to ask Rachel, who has been very patient with me, how to make words bold) I still struggle with some of the things that many of you can do in your sleep. For example setting up a WordPress blog is something I’m only now learning to do (the b5media guys don’t let me near the back end – and rightly so).
On one level this frustrates me a lot. I don’t like that if I want something done that goes beyond ‘tweaking’ my blog that I need to rely upon someone else. I also don’t like that even the most basic tweaks can take me many times longer to do than what others can do with a few keystrokes.
On the flip side of things I’m increasingly aware that it’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses and to work with them rather than against them. You see my brain is just not wired in a technical sort of way. I don’t naturally learn the technical things easily – in fact it takes numerous times of going through a process before I’ll get it (and even then I mess it up). While this is frustrating the realization that I’ve come to is that I don’t need to be good at everything because there are plenty of other people around who have the skills I don’t have who are willing to give advice, be hired to do work and even at times to do a little work for free or in exchange for some other services you might have to offer.
It is important to learn new skills and develop your abilities to do some of the basics but there will usually be an area that you’ll need to draw upon the expertise of others to balance out your own abilities.
I’d be interested for people to briefly share in comments below what type of blogging skills they do an don’t have. For one it’d be interesting to see what we do and don’t know collectively – but it might also be an opportunity for some working relationships to form between ProBlogger readers. I’m pretty confident that between everyone in the ProBlogger community we have the skills needed to get virtually every blog job done.
PS: I just saw this cool Photoshop Tutorial on creating Banner Ads over at Performancing which is exactly the type of instruction I need if I want to learn something technical. Step by step and using language that even I can understand. Of course I only have Photoshop Elements at present so it’s only ‘almost’ perfect for me.
