What Starting a Blog After 50 Really Taught Me: Building the Dream

Starting a blog after 50 has taught me more than I expected. I started this blogging journey 13+ years ago.

And today, I’m still working to prefect my craft.

And honestly, I think that’s pretty cool.

So welcome to another Building the Dream post. Last week, I wrote about starting a blog after 50. Today, I want to talk about what starting a blog after 50 has brought me, taught me, and reminded me along the way.

Because it has been a lot more than just writing posts and hoping Google notices.

The Importance of Keeping Your Website Updated

For the past two or three years, I was slacking on creating content.

There. I said it.

I wasn’t posting regularly. I wasn’t keeping the site fresh. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to what Google was doing with my content.

And it showed.

I was only getting crawled every once in a while, and on some days, I was seeing around five impressions a day. Five. Not exactly the kind of number that makes you start picking out yacht colors.

Now that I’ve saddled up and started posting on a regular basis again, my impressions are closer to 250 a day.

Is that huge?

No.

Is it progress?

Yes.

And I’ll take progress.

Because here’s what I’ve learned. If you don’t care enough to keep your website updated, Google probably isn’t going to care enough to show it to people.

That might sound harsh, but it’s true.

It’s a two-way street.

Starting a Blog After 50: Choosing a Blog Topic

When I first started, I wanted to create a website that earned passive income.

And yes, I know. The phrase “passive income” can make it sound like you write three blog posts, take a nap, and wake up rich.

That is not exactly how this works.

But at the time, I didn’t know that.

So I started reading books, listening to podcasts, and signing up for free stuff. I tried to learn as much as I could while also pretending I had some idea what I was doing.

Spoiler alert: I did not.

But that’s okay.

When you are starting a blog after 50, you don’t need to have the whole thing figured out. You just need to pick a topic, start learning, and be willing to adjust as you go.

My first site was a WordPress.com site. I wrote on WordPress because it was free to use. I didn’t have to buy a domain or a theme, or any plugin.

WordPress was easy to start with, and that mattered. But I guess, starting there, is what got me hooked.

Eventually, I realized I wanted my own domain, danswords.com.

Once that became available, I grabbed it.

And I’ve been blogging here ever since.

You Don’t Need to Be a Tech Expert

I was learning as I went along.

Or as I like to say, I was building the plane while flying it.

I started with no real blogging knowledge. I made mistakes. I changed things. I broke things. I fixed some of them, but probably broke a few more.

But, hey, I survived and so did my blog.

That’s part of the deal.

You do not need to be a tech expert to start a blog.

You do not need to know every plugin, every SEO trick, every Google update, or every tiny detail about WordPress before you begin.

If you wait until you know everything, you’ll never start. And in in my normal fashion, I jumped in with both feet.

And here’s the funny thing.

I don’t regret starting that way.

Not even a little.

I learned so much because I had to learn. I watched my website grow. I watched it disappear. I watched it come back. I watched Google notice things I didn’t expect and ignore things I thought were brilliant. 😆

That is blogging.

It can be frustrating, but it also teaches you a lot.

Your First Blog Posts Don’t Need to Be Perfect

This one is so true.

I recently found some of my very first blog posts saved on my harddrive.

OMG. 😲

I actually cringed while reading them.

Some were around 400 words long. Some may have been between 500 and 600 words. And a few of them probably had all the structure of a folding chair in a windstorm.

But you know what?

They were written from the heart.

They were written with good intentions.

And they were written because I was trying to help people.

That still counts.

I may go back and clean some of them up. I may remove a few from Google with a nofollow or noindex tag. I may rewrite others completely.

But I don’t look at those early posts as failures.

They were part of the road.

And sometimes, when you’re starting a blog after 50, that’s what you have to remind yourself.

The first version does not have to be perfect.

It just has to exist.

You can improve it later.

Starting a Blog After 50 Open Unexpected Doors

This is the part I didn’t see coming.

When I started blogging, I had big dreams of earning income from a website. I imagined posts ranking in Google, people finding my content, and maybe someday turning this into something bigger.

But the best part so far has not been the money.

It has been the people.

I met people I never would have known because of this blog.

There’s Martin in Sweden. There’s Steven and Maureen in England. There are others too.

That still blows my mind a little.

I started this whole thing with a dream of sitting on a beach with my laptop watching the cash roll in.

I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know if anyone would ever care. I didn’t know if I would stick with it.

But I did.

And this past week reminded me of something important.

I watched someone find one of my posts from Google. Then I watched that person click through to another post.

That may not sound like much.

But to me, it was enough.

It was proof that this thing is still moving.

Slowly, maybe.

But moving.

And maybe that’s the whole point of Building the Dream.

You start somewhere. You learn as you go. You keep showing up. You fix what needs fixing.

And you keep writing.

And then one day, someone you’ve never met finds your words and leaves a comment on your site.

That’s enough to keep going.

Starting a Blog After 50: Let’s Wrap This Up

Starting a blog after 50 has taught me that you don’t need to have everything figured out.

You don’t need to be a tech expert.

You don’t need perfect posts.

You don’t need instant traffic.

You just need a reason to keep going.

For me, that reason has changed over the years. At first, it was passive income. Then it was learning WordPress. Then it was building danswords.com. Now, it’s something bigger.

It’s writing.

It’s helping people.

It’s watching the slow little signs that maybe, just maybe, this dream is still alive.

And if starting a blog after 50 has taught me anything, it’s this:

The dream doesn’t have to happen fast to be worth building.