To Blog or Not to Blog?
Let’s be honest…blogging is hard. In fact, Michael Parsons touts it as the “hand-to-hand combat of the writing world”. Creating and maintaining a successful blog is a huge undertaking, and those that are really successful at it put forth great amounts of effort. They eat, they sleep, and they blog.
The blogosphere really is another world, with it’s own set of rules and etiquette that you’ll need to learn. You should set aside time to read other people’s blogs, and try to establish relationships with other bloggers. Learn when to comment, when to post your own content, and when to link to other blogs. Staying up to date can quickly turn into a full time job if you let it, so here are a few tips to help:
- Write about something you like and write often. Seems like common sense, but readers will know if you aren’t sincere and you’ll build up loyal readership faster by making new content available regularly.
- Stay well-informed. Get your facts straight and be aware of what others are writing about the same topic. Readers will nail you to the proverbial wall for obvious duplicate posts or not fact checking first.
- Promote your blog. Readers will not be magically drawn to your site so you’ll need to do some grunt work, especially in the beginning. Ping, use trackbacks, and leave comments on other relavent blog posts to let others know what you are up to. Use gimmicks, wit, a specific tagline - anything to get noticed, the internet is a black hole of information that is easy to get lost in. Lastly, make use of social bookmarking and article submission sites by submitting one of your better posts once in a while to reel in new visitors.
- Don’t just blog for the sake of blogging. Have an opinion or something useful/interesting to say or no one will pay attention
- Have thick skin. Readers will leave harsh comments, its part of the game. Respond (tactfully) if you must and then move on. If it bothers you, use comment moderation to weed out the particularly hurtful ones.
- Hang in there. It will get easier. Most bloggers who get discouraged and quit do it in the first few months. Building an audience takes time, and it doesn’t really matter how many people you are reaching as long as that number keeps growing. The older your blog gets the more credibility it will earn.
It’s hard, and its not for everyone - but blogging can be very rewarding. Adding a blog is a great way to make sure your site has fresh content, you’ll get your point across to lots of people, and hopefully you’ll have fun and gain satisfaction from sharing information with others and participating in online communitites.
November 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Blogging has not only been fun for me but very rewarding! Over the last few years I have establish relationships with other bloggers whom I would have never met, and learned more than I could have ever imagined.
In this time I have saw many bloggers come and go as they seem to think it will be easy, which for the most part blogging is. However many think they can jump right in, put in no effort and have a great blog and it just does not work that way!
November 5th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
I agree with Tara; social contacting with other is one of the many good rewards of blogging, however it dosen’t come “Just Like That” because blogging needs effort and patience. This is one hand.
On the other hand, I wonder about people who just drop by blogs and scan the posts and don’t bother themselves with reading the posts correctly to get the meaning and you find strange + irrelevant comments!