Better Blogging, Part Deux

I hope you checked out the first part of this mega-pillar post yesterday. If not, you can see the first half of Better Blogging here. It was a monster, but this one is even larger as I drive my points home.

It’s time to talk about actually writing blog posts. Every blog post is going to need a title, but there’s nothing saying you have to have a title first. Some blogging experts will tell you that you should create a title for maximum SEO (search engine optimization) benefits. Whereas I’m sure that can help, sometimes creating a title that will entice readers to come by works just as well. Would you rather read a post that has a title like “How To Regularly Acknowledge Your Direct Reports” or a title like “5 Ways To Make Employees Happy?” Also, try not to make your titles too long; it makes it harder for people who might want to give you acknowledgment for anarticle you’ve written on their blogs if you have a title that’s so long it’s unwieldy.

Next, let’s talk about actually writing posts. Do you remember writing stories back when you were in grade school? The teachers always talked about the concept of a story having a beginning, middle, and an end. Blog posting is kind of like that, even if you can bend the rules a little bit. It never hurts to establish near the beginning of the post what the post is going to be about, especially if it’s an educational post. If you’re telling a story, the beginning doesn’t necessarily have to flow as well, but it does need to have something to capture people’s attention so that they will stick around to read the rest of it. The ending of a blog post is important as well, mainly to help indicate to people that it’s officially over. I have read a lot of blog posts where you get to the end and you’re thinking there should be more to it. Leaving people hanging will irritate them and make them not want to come back. I’m going to come back to talk about the “middle” in a few minutes.

The length of blog posts is something that a lot of people like to talk about. From my perspective, in general a blog post is as long as or as short as it needs to be. That of course leaves a lot of leeway and doesn’t really answer the question as to whether it’s better to write long or short blog posts. The truth of the matter is that there’s no real answer for that because some readers don’t mind reading long blog posts, and actually prefer them because they know they’re going to get all the answers they want and need, whereas some others only want to be given the first two or three paragraphs as the entire blog post and then move on with their lives. We have made it through the MTV generation after all, where many people learned how to get everything they wanted in three or four minute chunks and didn’t have to concentrate on anything any longer. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to anyone else’s view of how long or how short you want your post to be. 

Having said that, it’s more important looking at how short a blog post is than how long one is. Studies have shown that if the majority of your blog posts aren’t at least 250 words long you’re probably not going to get much benefit out of them. With Google’s new algorithms looking at content that actually offers something of value, it’s hard to justify in their minds that most people can gain value out of consistently short blog posts. This doesn’t mean that every once in a while you can’t get away with writing a short post; after all, if you’re trying to get the word out about some disaster that’s happening now, and you only have a short period of time or only know so much about it, you can’t always be expected to come up with 250 words at a clip. If you don’t care whether Google or any other search engine will help your post or blog to gain traction, then write what you want to. However, if you’re really looking to spread your influence and want the help of the search engines, you’ve got to work on helping to give them what they’re looking for.

Now we come back to talking about the “middle” and thoughts of when to ramble and when to get to the point. Let’s do this in concepts of educating somebody versus customer service. 

If you’re trying to teach someone how to do something, it doesn’t always help to go off on tangents of things that have nothing to do with what you’re trying to teach. For instance, in my college astronomy class, the teacher was always talking about fishing and things like casting, rods, and all other sorts of stuff that I had actually no idea what any of it meant. He was of the impression that he could connect fishing information with astronomy to teach us how to do calculations. It didn’t work for me, and even though I knew a lot about astronomy, having read a lot about it through my childhood years, it became a difficult course to pass because of how confused this man made me.

Now let’s relate this to customer service. On occasion I’ve had to call my ISP (internet service provider) to ask questions about my service. What invariably happens is that I get someone on the phone who hears a portion of what I have to say and then immediately cuts me off and starts trying to solve what they think is my issue. The problem is that I’m often more technically savvy than the first person I talk to, and thus they’re trying to solve a problem that’s not my issue, that I know isn’t my issue, and that I know won’t be solved by any of the advice they’re starting to give me because they haven’t taken the time to fully listen to what I have to say. 

Sometimes life and blogging are just like that; you need to have some filler, which some people might consider as rambling, in order to get the nuances of what you have to say better understood. This works especially well when you’re telling a story of some kind. If you leave a lot of detail out, the accuracy of your story will be lacking. People either have questions, or leave without understanding what the heck you’re talking about. Trying to get to the point without making sure everyone understands what it is you’re talking about just to try to keep a blog post short will surely kill your blog because people like knowing everything they need to know to get where you’re coming from.

So when not to ramble? If you make a point about something, there’s no need to make that point 3 or 4 times in the same post. That type of thing gets on people’s nerves. Also, making extraneous points that don’t help to clarify anything or add to the enjoyment of the story can be left out. If you happen to be talking about someone and you’re giving a description that they have blue curly hair that flows into a mullet that merges in with a Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirt they’re wearing, that’s a funny image. But if you’re talking about someone you happen to think is overweight and then go on a rant about overweight people in general before getting back to the rest to your story, that was probably not needed and you might have turned off a lot of people. Circumspection is always your best friend when trying to decide whether you’ve rambled too much or whether you’ve told enough to give the story or whatever it is you’re writing about enough substance.

So now you’ve written your blog article and you’ve posted it for all to see. Before you did that, did you think about whether you wanted to receive comments or not? The overwhelming majority of bloggers want to have comments on their blog posts. Blogging is part of social media after all, and being able to interact with others who respond to the things we write about is what makes blogging so special.

But there are people who either don’t want comments or want to restrict comments. Seth Godin is a perfect example of someone who doesn’t allow comments on his blog. He’s a big name person who’s written a lot of books, and not allowing comments has not stopped a lot of people from reading his blog or sharing his thoughts with other people. But not everyone can get away with that. Some people will write blog posts and every once in a while and then write one that they don’t want anyone commenting on. Many times it’s either a very personal post or rant that someone just has to get out, but would rather not deal with the controversy that allowing comments could create. Some people write blog posts and have a very short period of time that they leave comments open before they shut them down. I’m not going to say that any of these are good or bad; what I am going to say is that you as the blog writer has to make a choice of which direction you want to go and what you’re hoping to accomplish.

If you’re going to allow comments on your blog, I’m always of the opinion that it’s best to make it easy for people to comment. I’m someone who doesn’t moderate comments, set up exclusive blogging comment systems, or make people jump through hoops in order to leave a comment. The reason I don’t do that is because there have been a number of studies which have shown that a majority of people don’t like always having to sign up for the right to offer their opinion on something; I’m one of those people. For instance, if you’ve ever visited newspaper sites that allow comments, you’ll notice eventually that you’re seeing the same names over and over. It makes sense for a newspaper site to screen people because their expectation should be higher to protect both their readers and their advertisers. It doesn’t happen enough in my opinion, but for those that are doing it I applaud them for that effort.

For the rest of us, it doesn’t engender enough good feeling from those people who visit our blogs to put up roadblocks to the act of commenting. There have been a number of studies that have shown that having a system like Disqus or Intense Debate might raise the quality of comments that show up on a blog, but between 50% and 60% of people won’t sign up for those services and will either just read the content without ever wanting to comment or stop visiting those blogs altogether because of the frustration of not being able to comment however they want to. 

The case for moderating comments is entirely different. People have different reasons for wanting to moderate comments, which can go from wanting to make sure certain information doesn’t show up on a blog post or making sure that no comment gets through that potentially has people saying something that the owner of the blog wishes not to allow. My gripe about visiting blogs that moderate comments is that you often find that later on at some point, when you’re least expecting it, you suddenly getting a whole lot of messages all at once both from people who comment on the blog and the blog owner’s response to those people. If that blog happens to be popular it can be overwhelming. It also gives the appearance of not trusting people who want to comment on your blog. Now, if you put your reasons up as to why you moderate comments, many people will accept that but at least they get to then make the decision as to whether they want to participate or not. I hate when I don’t know someone has a moderation policy and I do leave a post, only to realize that I have no idea when, or if, it will ever show. And I’ve had a lot of comments that have never shown up on someone’s blog.

Of course the big thing most of us worry about is spam. We all hate spam, but there’s nothing we can do to stop it totally. However, with most blog platforms there are these things that are known as plugins that can help slow it down drastically. They’re easy to set up and easy to use for both the blog owner and those who wish to make comments, and if you’re setting up different blog commenting ways to reduce spam, such as moderating or coming up with things like Captcha or math problems, it’s a better way to go.

We’re coming into the home stretch, and if you’ve lasted this long I thank you for it. These are some final thoughts towards the concept of better blogging.

I’m often asked where I get inspiration for ideas to write my blog posts. My goodness, every day of life is an inspiration to write a blog post, and for non-niche blogs it’s even easier. But since I do try to stay on certain topics more than other topics, I find that doing a lot of reading of other blogs really helps my mind figure out what I want to write on. For instance, if I happen to be reading someone’s post and they’re talking about 10 ways to do something, I could not only decide to write a commentary post on that article, it also gives me an opportunity to link back to that article. That way the original writer gets a boost from my article, and I have a new article as well. I honestly get ideas from my real life on a consistent basis, but I can get ideas by turning on the TV, following a thread on Twitter, or almost anywhere else. My problem is that I come up with so many ideas that I sometimes forget what they are when it’s time to write something. Lucky for me, I can always come up with something else fairly quickly to write on. Inspiration is everywhere; you only have to be alert and open to it.

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there’s also the concept of “sharing the love”. People love knowing that you enjoyed their article enough to link to it, even if you disagree with their point of view. It never hurts to link to anybody, and that type of thing often encourages people to link to you as well. Something that works well with commenting, especially if you have a WordPress blog, is called CommentLuv. What that does is allows people to have a link back to their blog if they comment on yours showing the very last blog post they’ve written, and if they’ve registered with the site they get to choose from the last 10 blog posts they’ve written. I know that has gotten me a lot of visitors, and I also know that it’s provided me with enough blogs to be able to check out, see if I like them, and comment on.

Earlier I also talked about selling ad space on a blog, but that brings up your making the decision on whether you want to have advertising, marketing, or sell space on your blog or not. Google does have some rules for how you sell or market certain things on your blog (pertaining more to how you share certain types of links) to continue being listed on their search engine, but whether you care or not about that is irrelevant. If you’re using your blog to help you create influence or to get clients for projects or services, then marketing every once in a while isn’t such a bad thing for you to think about. If you’re trying to make money via affiliate marketing or MLM (multi-level marketing), that’s not such a bad thing either. If your blog happens to be popular enough and someone wants to pay for the space to add some kind of banner ad to it, that’s not so bad either. Each person has to make a decision on what they hope their blog will do or what they want to put on their blog. You just need to be aware of how these things might affect the people who visit your blog and determine how much or how little it might affect their enjoyment when they stop by. Also, you need to be aware that adding text ads that don’t ever have anything to do with what your content it about opens you up to someone reporting you and having your blog lose it’s Google PR (page rank). That’s what happened to my blog, although, as some of you know, I think PR is overrated anyway.

Something many bloggers forget to do is internally link to their own previous blog posts. With WordPress there are plugins that can handle some of this for you, and I know that with other blog platforms there are programs that can also do that. But any time you can link to your own content gives you the opportunity to keep people on your blog, get them interested in other things that they may be looking for, and helps to show your expertise while helping to spread your influence. It also helps with SEO, especially if you’re familiar with the concept of anchor links, which basically means using a link to highlight a certain word that is either also in the link or that will take you to a page that specifically talks about that word or topic.

Then there’s the concept of how frequent you want to put out blog posts, and what time you’re putting out blog posts. I happen to have four blogs, and my frequency schedule is different for all of them. For instance, on this blog I write 6 to 7 posts a week. On another blog I write for a five posts a week, but the posts are relegated to the business day. On the third blog the idea is to have 3 to 4 posts a week. And on my fourth blog I’m shooting for one post a week at this time, as it’s very new and it’s going to take a little bit of time for me to figure out everything I’m hoping that blog will end up being. I have a goal for that one, as I mentioned way back when that people should think about when they create a blog, but how to fully manifest it is something that one does not have to figure out before they start blogging. To me, it’s always important to just start something and get it going. As to what time of day… well, that one’s still under consideration, as I’ve yet to figure out whether it’s best to post in the morning or in the afternoon; posting in the evening means I risk a blog post not showing up in some areas until the following day, and that I don’t want to happen.

I know you’re starting to get tired, so the final thing to talk about is how to get the word out about your blog. You can’t just write a whole lot of posts and expect people to show up; blogging doesn’t work that way. You have many options available to you. One, you can send a link to your blog to everybody you know via email. Two, you can hook up on something like Twitter and make sure that every blog post also post itself to Twitter. Three, what you’ve done for Twitter you can also do for other social media outlets such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Four, you can make sure that every blog post automatically “pings” to what’s known as a blog pinging service such as Ping-o-Matic; this means it alerts blog directories that you’ve written a new post. Or five, you can learn how to work the blogging community and blog networking via the concept of commenting on a lot of other blogs. I’ve done all of these, and the one that I found most effective is commenting on other blogs. It just offers the most options across the board, especially if those blogs happen to have Comment Luv. It also takes the most time, but you can get the most enjoyment out of doing it.

And that’s the end of this killer pillar post on better blogging. I’ve covered a lot of ground here, and I make no promises that I didn’t leave anything out; after all, this is a huge subject. Any questions, just ask; I’m going to bed.

 

Better Blogging, Part One

If any of you remember reading my goals for 2011 for this blog, you’ll remember that one of those goals was to write 2 pillar posts for the year. If you don’t remember the concept of the pillar post, follow the link to the description of what it’s all about.

Basically, this is about to be a very long post. Its intention is to put as many concepts of my belief of what better blogging is all about in one place. Most of the concepts in this post I have covered elsewhere on this blog, but they’re scattered in many different articles, including the series I have up at the top of this blog talking about blogging tips. For the majority of you who visit this blog all the time, this post really isn’t for you. I’d love you to take the time to read it and comment on it if you wish to, but the truth of the matter is I don’t expect most of you to take the time to read this entire post. I know Beverly’s not going to read it, but Bev, this is a post that you might want to share with some of your readers or radio listeners whenever the topic of what blogging is all about comes up.

And I’ve made a slight change to what I was originally going to do. This post has ended up being more than 5,300 words long, and even for a pillar post that’s a bit long. So, I’ve broken it up into two posts, which I’m going to run back to back. That means two blog posts in a row are going to be extremely long; oh joy! But I’m adding some pictures here and there to help break things up some; you can thank or curse me for it later.

Everybody has been warned this is going to be long; let’s get started.

Let’s get this first concept out of the way; what is real blogging? I’m using that term to differentiate it from other types of blogging that, in my opinion, really aren’t blogging at all. Real blogging isn’t a bunch of sales posts. Real blogging isn’t a bunch of news posts. Real blogging is putting together posts that have to do with either your opinion, or the opportunity to show your expertise in something. If all you’re doing is posting a bunch of pictures or videos all the time, that’s not real blogging because you really haven’t given anything of yourself. That is, of course, not assuming that every video you put on a blog is you talking; I think we can make an allowance for that, because some people really hate writing and would rather make videos. And, as I’ve learned lately, it does take some work to get videos down to a science so that you don’t look like an idiot.

There are many pros to blogging. The number one pro is the opportunity to express yourself in the open to let people know how you feel and how you think. After all, wasn’t the point of blogging if you’re not going to do that? The sidebar pro to that is if you’re blogging to highlight your business or your expertise in something. Blogging is a great way to show that, and because blogs aren’t static, that meaning you have the opportunity to write something new every day if you want to, you also get to show the range of your expertise.

Another pro about blogging is that you can make money from it. Not all that many people make a lot of money from it, but it can happen. I don’t make a lot of money off of this blog, but I have a different blog where I’ve taken in a lot of money from people who want to advertise on it. I’m not rich by any means, but as I continue to add content and traffic continues to buildm the possibility of increasing how much money I make off that blog will grow. But anyone who blogs only for the reason of trying to make money will often find themselves failing, wondering why it didn’t work, and giving it up.

Of course you can’t have pros of something without talking about the negatives of something, and there are some negatives to blogging. One, it takes time to blog. Some people, like me, can put together a regular blog post within 10 minutes to a half hour. Some people take days to put together blog posts, and that’s okay as well. The overall thing to take away from this is that blogging isn’t something you can do quickly. True, you can hire someone to write your blog, but it’s still going to take them some time to get new articles onto your blog.

Another negative about blogging is the same as one of the pros, that being you put yourself out there for people to comment on what it is you have to say, and if they don’t like what you have to say you have to figure out whether you can handle their criticism or not. Not everybody will agree with everything you have to say, especially if you don’t say it in the way you mean it, and reacting the wrong way even once to a bad comment can hurt your blog for a long time to come.

One last negative is keeping a blog going for a long time. Some very well known bloggers who have had great success with their blogs and made money off their blogs have suddenly found themselves two or three years later feeling too much pressure to continue writing those blogs. A minor statistic I did for myself a couple of weeks ago, based on looking at people who make comments on this blog when it was new, show that almost 50% of those blogs no longer existed, or the people who had them had stopped writing on them. Other statistics have shown that close to 70% of all blogs that are created don’t last longer than a year. One thing I always say to people is that if you don’t think you can write on something for longer than a year don’t even start, because nothing looks worse than an abandoned blog.

If I haven’t scared you off yet, let’s talk about what you need to think about before you ever start blogging.

The first thing to think about is what you’re going to write about. There are two things to consider when you’re going to look at this issue. The first issue is what do you know? For instance, if you’re an accountant and that’s what you know very well, then maybe you’ll decide to write on accounting. Or maybe you know a lot about fashion, even if that’s not your profession, and you can go that route. The more you know about a subject, the better the possibility is that you’ll be able to write on it for a long time.

The second issue is what is your passion? For instance, even if you’re an accountant and know a lot about accounting, you might want to talk about monster trucks instead because it’s a passion of yours. It certainly offers up the opportunity to appeal to more people than accounting might, and unless you’re writing a business blog, passion and enthusiasm goes a long way towards attracting other people to your blog. It also helps if you have a lot of knowledge in what you’re passionate about. It does no good to say you love television yet can’t remember the names of any of the TV shows you watch or the actors who are on those shows.

Something else to think about is the concept of niche versus non-niche blogging. A niche blog basically says you write on one subject and one subject only. Say for instance that you want to talk about painting, and I mean house or building painting, not art. Every article you write will concern painting and nothing else. However, a niche blog doesn’t mean that you have to limit yourself as much as you might think. For instance, talking about painting houses or buildings offers a lot of things you can talk about. You can talk about different brands of paint; you can talk about the ways of mixing paints together; you can talk about the different types of paint; you can talk about different ways of painting, such as textures and the like; you can even talk about some of the problems and successes you have had in painting different surfaces. There are lot more topics I could come up with, and I don’t even know how to paint.

Non-niche blogging is a different story entirely. For instance, you might be someone who likes to write a lot of stories on different subjects, even funny stories. You might be a conspiracy theorist that sees government intrusions across the world in many different areas. Or you might be someone who just likes to tell things about your life, what you discover, or anything that comes to mind, kind of like this blog most of the time. Not having a niche means you can pretty much write about anything, and therefore you should always have some kind of inspiration to continue going. It can be a lot easier to write, but it can be a lot harder to consistently keep certain people coming to your blog and it’s certainly hard to optimize. But it’s not a bad thing, and even non-niche blogs can make money, if that’s concern of yours, which might go against the grain of all those people out there who say the only way you can make money off a blog is to write a niche blog.

Something else to talk about is the concept of free versus self hosted blogs. There are a lot of free services out there where you can create a blog and start writing almost immediately. A service like Blogger (Blogspot), which is owned by Google, or WordPress.com, offers people a way to start a blog in minutes without having to worry about either paying for it or getting it set up.

Self hosting basically means you’re going to pay little bit of money for the freedom of being able to do whatever you want to do. There are always restrictions of some kind if you’re using a free service, and many people have found that if they cross the line without knowing it suddenly their blog is gone and they’ll lose access to anything that they’ve put on it previously. Self hosting means you’re going to pay for a domain name, and you’re going to pay for place to host your blog, which basically means you’re paying for storage space. There are a lot more choices and things you can do if you self host your blog then if you go with the free option. However, both of the free options I mentioned above also have a paid option, and that might be something you want to consider if you decide you want to blog for a long time.

The next thing to think about is, if you’re going to self host your blog, the blogging platform you want to use. Once again, there are free or paid options. I have chosen WordPress as my blogging platform. It’s free software that’s always being updated to protect against those bad guys who want to take it over, and there are literally tens of thousands of different templates out there that allow you to change the look of your blog. That plus it’s easy to use; if you know anything about coding or aren’t afraid to tinker you can make even further changes. There are also paid platforms such as FlexSqueeze and Thesis. There are some people who will tell you that you have to pay for a theme in order to look professional; that’s a bunch of garbage. What you need to be able to do is write quality content and possibly make some modifications to whatever theme you decide to use to make it seem more like your blog.

The final thing to think about before you start blogging is what your overall goal is going to be. This is going to drive how you decide to move forward with your blog. Is your goal to make money? Is your goal to show expertise in a certain field? Is your goal to help spread your influence? Is your goal to help you publicize yourself? Is your goal to create controversy? You should think about all these things up front before you start, although there’s nothing saying that you can’t mix some of these things here and there.

This is the end of the first half of this topic on better blogging. Tomorrow you’ll have access to part deux of this pillar series of mine. I wonder if I get to count these two parts as the two pillar posts I was going to write for the year. Hmmm…

Blogging Step Six – How To Start Getting Visitors

Recently I was asked by a friend of mine to talk to someone who’s just started a new blog and hopes to help it spread. I wrote 5 things that I believe are the way to go when you’re just starting out to get visitors to come to your blog. Actually, I believe all of these are good even with existing blogs if you’re not doing them, so I’ve decided to post what I wrote here, with a few modifications of course, and it will be added to my Blogging Tips at the top.

1. Post each blog article to Twitter. Of course this means you have to join Twitter and have followers who will see those posts, and some will retweet them, which gives them the opportunity to be viewed by a much larger audience. Blogging packages like WordPress has many plugins that can help you automate the process; I don’t know if Blogger allows blogs to do it, in which case you’ll have to copy and paste your link every time, something I don’t have to do. As a sidebar, I hate Blogger! lol

2. Set up both Facebook and LinkedIn to grab each blog post. On FB there are multiple apps that will do it. On LinkedIn, you can set it up within your profile.

3. Comment on like-minded blogs. This one is the most time consuming, but the truth is that, unless you’re already famous, the best way to get visitors is by commenting on other blogs, mainly blogs that are similar in content in some fashion to what you’re writing about. People get used to seeing your name and will follow you back to your blog to check you out. Of course, commenting on other blogs works pretty well also, especially if it’s something else you’re interested in.

4. Add the link to your blog in every correspondence you send out, and of course to your website if you have one. In email, if you send email to someone who opens their mail online, it helps provide a link that, if they click on it, helps build up web prominence a little bit. Of course, being on Blogger, it won’t help as much. However, just to say this, by being on Blogger you’re going to get some random traffic because of that link thing at the top where it says “next blog”, but it’s not targeted traffic so you might not get many comments, or people who will stay long enough to read what you’ve written.

5. Send out one big email to all your friends and business associates, if you’re comfortable with that. Those are pretty much considered “friendlies”, and they’ll visit at least once, and some of them will subscribe and tell others. It’s a great place to start.

Blogging Step Five – How Often To Post

It’s been almost 3 months since the last post of the blogging series, so, before I go further, let’s list the other four:

Step One: What To Write About

Step Two: Where To Create Your Blog

Step Three: How To Create Your Blog

tep Four: What And How To Write

So, if you want to start at the beginning, and if you want to think about it some more by reading this post, we’re ready to move onto the next part.

A question that’s often asked is how often someone should write. Kelly McCausey, substituting for Alice Seba as she has a baby, wrote on Alice’s blog that she recommends to her coaching clients that they write at least 2,000 words a week, and finds that clients seem to not only appreciate the advice, but end up writing more often. 

I subscribe to a lot of blogs, and I find that there are some people who will post 3-7 times a day, some who try to write one post a day, and some who try to write 2-3 times a week. Occasionally there’s one who writes once a week, and if they write less than once every couple of weeks, unless they’re friends of mine, mine, I don’t stay subscribed for long. When I’m home, I write one post a day on this blog. Actually, let me clarify that; I make at least one post a day. Sometimes I’ll only post something, like a video of something that’s caught my fancy, even if it’s something old and odd:

Okay, I watched that when I was a kid; I admit it. Anyway, you may not know this from reading this particular blog, but in my real life I’m an independent consultant, so there are times when I’m out of town a lot, like right now. I stay in hotels, and not all of them have the best internet service, so posting something daily becomes problematic. So, right now, I post more on the weekends, yet still try to get at least one post in during the week. If you’re hoping to attract visitors, and keep those visitors, then you need to post new content on some kind of regular basis to encourage people to keep coming back. If you write once a month, no one’s going to remember to come back, but if you write regularly, and you’re entertaining or informative, then people hopefully will come, and keep coming. 

Then, if your purpose is to show you have some kind of knowledge that will help you get contracts or work later on, or your purpose is to make money with your blog, you’ll have better chances to do both. And, let’s face this fact; why have a blog in the first place if you’re not going to write anything to begin with?

Oh yeah, let me be clear about my terms. What’s in this particular post, for the most part, is writing; the video is just a red herring. Some people post only pictures; some videos, and some others post sound files. In a way it doesn’t matter as long as you’re consistent, but in another way it does matter. If you’re posting videos, one has to hope you also have something to say, and that every once in awhile it’s you in the videos saying something because you hate typing. Videos can be nice, but if that’s all you post, people won’t like it too much because watching videos takes time. The same can be said for audio; great stuff every once in awhile, but they take time to listen to. Posting pictures goes the other way; if that’s all you do, it gets boring after awhile because you’re not really giving something of yourself. So, there has to be a mix of media if you’re going to do it at all.

And there you go. I hope some of you have read the series and taken to blogging on your own. I’d love to know how it’s working out for you thus far. And I’d like to highlight someone else who writes a great blog on blogging ideas, and that would be Barbara Ling. She offers a lot of great stuff.

Blogging Step Four – What And How To Write

This will be the final installment of the blogging series for now, and I hope it’s helped illuminate what blogging can be about. If you have questions or other topics you’d like me to address, leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

If you’ve read all the previous installments, then you remember that step one dealt with think about what you want to write about. Now we get a bit further into it. A recommendation I’ll make is, if you’re not sure how to get started on your topic, write down 10 things you believe you can write something on. If you can’t think of at least 10 topics from the beginning then you’re already in trouble, and you didn’t learn anything from step one. 

This part should be fairly easy, though. For instance, let’s say your blog is going to be on show dogs. One would assume your first post is going to be about dog shows in general, just to get started. Then you could write about what judges look for in individual dogs, or you can pick specific dogs to talk about, which would be a bunch of topics. You could talk about the history of certain dog shows, or previous winners of the dog shows, both the dogs and the trainers. Heck, you could talk about trainers, and families of winners throughout history. For someone who may be thinking about this as a blog topic, I’ve just given you at least 100 posts.

The “how” is somewhat different. A question I’ve heard asked over and over is how long a blog post should be. The true answer is a blog post should be as long or as short as it needs to be. If you look at the last 10 posts on this blog, for instance, you’ll see that four were long, four were short, and two were somewhere in the middle. A blog post really can be one paragraph; probably shouldn’t be one line, unless you’re highlighting an image, movie, or sound file of some type. A blog post can be long, but just how long is long? If you’re writing a dissertation it’s too long; no one is going to stick around that long reading a blog post. It’s too much like work; blogs aren’t supposed to be that detailed. 

That’s why I’ve broken this up into a series, instead of putting it all into one post. But another reason for doing it is that it’s given me four posts instead of just one, which obviously helps me build up my content, but it gives me more opportunities to advertise some stuff; yeah, it’s a little crass, but hey, a guy’s gotta try to make a buck, right? If you can break a very long post up, you still get to say everything you wanted to say, but spread out, you give people a reason to keep coming back for more.

And there you go; we’ve made it through a whole short series on blogging. Now I can chill and maybe post a video of something; yeah, we all need more videos. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Blogging Step Three – How To Create Your Blog

This particular post isn’t going to detail the process of downloading software or how to set up a blog on a blogging site. The “how to” is regarding how you want your blog to look, based on the purpose and your personal style.

As a for instance, when I decided I was going to create this blog, I knew that I wanted to have the middle for the content and sidebars on both sides of it. In other words, I knew coming in I wanted a 3-column template. You can get a blog without any sidebars, one sidebar, or even 3 sidebars, giving yourself four columns.

What are the purposes for all those columns? Let’s look at it in a little better detail, starting with only the one column. Basically this means you just want to write your blog and don’t want anything taking away from what you have to say. You’re not looking to advertise anything. The problem with this is that you probably won’t have many people link to your blog because many people like to at least have the opportunity to receive a link back, and a one column blog wouldn’t have a place to link. Also, blogs will keep archives of past posts, and it will break them into both categories and date ranges, but there won’t be a place for that to display so you can’t even show people that information. What I don’t know is how one would get into a one column blog to sign in, though there’s obviously a way. Overall, you lose a lot with this format.

Looking at a two column blog, usually it means the column where you’re entries are is wider than the other column, which can be on either the right or left side. This is the most common template, as it allows a person to show everything that’s meant to be shown, such as all the things I mentioned above, as well as allowing for some type of advertising if one so chose. The problem with only having one column is that you may end up having too much stuff in the one smaller column that your site looks junky. At the same time, since your content will probably be long, you have a lot of room to get things on there.

A three column blog offers more flexibility if you’re looking to advertise and also want to keep all the other stuff mentioned earlier. You can also add a calendar and many other things, and it offers you the ability to have some balances with your blog; I’m all about balance. What you have to think about, though, is whether you want the sidebars on each side of your main content or both on one side or the other. There’s no negatives to either, so it’s more of a personal choice.

A four column blog allows you to break things down even more, but in my mind, it’s too much and it’ll take away from whatever you’re writing about on your blog. A four column blog allows for the most diverse type of advertising, because you could have all your Adsense in one column, and all your affiliate ads in another.

The final thing to talk about, no matter which style you choose, is deciding on color. Overall, it doesn’t really matter what colors you pick depending on what you like, but you need to think about the readability of your blog for everyone who visits. For instance, picking green and pink for your blog might impede someone who suffers from color blindness from being able to read your blog easily. If you have a dark background with your blog you’ll want lighter print to offset it. Things always work best when there’s enough of a contrast to have either dark print against a light background or light print against a dark one. 

Finally, be sure that the title background fits the image you’re trying to project in some fashion. I picked the background image for this blog because it was red and red is my favorite color. I saw some that had nice picture backgrounds, but those didn’t fit my style. I saw some that I thought might look pretty nice, but in the end decided they also didn’t fit my style. If you have the knowledge, you can always change the pictures or colors later on, though, so the most important thing overall is choosing the style you’d like.

And there you go. What’s coming up next about blogs? Stay tuned.

Blogging Step Two – Where To Create Your Blog

In step one, I talked about the need to think about what you’d like to talk about. Now we’ll talk a little bit about where to create your blog.

There are four choices in deciding where to create your blog. You can decide to join a site that allows you to create your own independent blog. You can join a blogging site that’s more of a community. You can decide to add a blog to your existing website. Or you can decide you want to create a website and turn it into a blog.

Let’s look at each of these separately. On the first one, you can decide to join a site like Blogger, WordPress, Xanga or Typepad; those are the big names, but there are plenty others. Blogger is probably the biggest and best, and from what I understand it’s very easy to set up. You get to choose the colors, you can do advertising with Google Adsense or other affiliate ads, and you can even use it for business purposes if you so choose. It’s a good place to set up a starter blog. One negative of this type of blog is that you can’t optimize the site because it’s on another platform instead of your own site. Another negative is that you can’t control where your visitors might go next. Using Blogger as an example, there’s a choice your visitor can select at the top that allows visitors to go to another blog at random. The problem is that you never know what might come up, and some folks who’ve thought about using it to set up a professional site have worried that their visitor might click on that link and end up at an adult or inappropriate site next.

Most people who set up a blog on a community site are looking for friends, and those blogs tend to be more personal. Another reason they join is because of the promise of having an opportunity to share in the profits with the blog creator by having a Google Adsense number and, if you write good content, figuring that people will click on the ads next to your post and you’ll split the money with the creator. If it happens I’ve never seen it, as I’ve had a few blogs on these sites. What they allow you to do is create anonymous names so you can write whatever you want to write about, and many people use it as a diary of some sort. And, in putting your life out there, if you’re somewhat interesting or controversial you’ll get people who will comment on your blog, and we all love it when we have readers and commenters. But it’s doubtful that people who are there all the time will take the time to click on your Adsense blocks, and there’s no way to set up anything to track it, as all you get to do is plug in your advertiser number. So, these sites are more for vanity than anything else; you would never set up your business on one of these. But they can be a lot of fun.

You can decide to set your blog up attached to your current website. If it’s for your business, it will bring automatic prominence to your website, as long as you write often enough, because blogs are visited often by search engines, and they love seeing new content. Having a blog associated with your business can help you gain great credibility, or it can make you look incompetent and uncaring, so it’s a dicey proposition. Some businesses are afraid to offer what could be seen as an opinion or review of products, clients, services, etc because they worry about the negative press. But others believe that any press is good as long as it brings people to them. Either way, it’s still a tough decision to make, and one of my blogs is associated with one of my businesses.

The final way is to make an entire domain a blog, which is what I’ve done here. I tried to think of just what I wanted to write about, and what I wanted to call it, and then decided I wanted to share whatever I wanted to share, while advertising my affiliates and such. This is the best way to have independent control without having to worry about how it affects your other businesses or life, because, if you wish, you can still maintain some bit of anonymity. Of course, you have to worry about paying for another domain, as well as hosting, but it’s not such a bad thing because the benefits of linking to other content, including some of your other sites, isn’t a bad thing.

And there you go. Next time, we’ll talk about the hows of creating a blog.

Blogging Step One – What To Write About

A blog is an online journal of either personal or business ideas that people want to share with other people online. Some people write to get things off their chest. Some people write to journal their day. Some people write to give their opinion on things such as politics or religion. Some people write to show off their expertise in a particular field. And some people blog to make money; nothing wrong with that.

Before even starting a blog, you should take some time to decide what you want to write about. Many people come up with a quick idea, think it’s cool, and decide that’s where they want to go. But if you’re going to blog a long time, or if you have a purpose other than just ranting, you shouldn’t skip this step.

At the same time you’re thinking about what you want to write about, you also have to decide if you’re going to try to make any money off it by adding things such as Google’s Adsense, Clickbank, or any other affiliate or PPC (pay per click) types of ads. It’s an important decision because it helps you to determine whether you’re looking to write a fun blog, a business blog of some type, or a personal blog. If you’re going to use a blog more as a diary and you’re hoping to make money off it, the ads that come up probably won’t help you much.

So, say you want to write a business blog, and you’re a financial counselor; I’m going to use this one because I’ve seen this topic fail a lot. Think about how much you could write on a consistent basis on just that topic if it’s your business. Think about who you might be aiming your posts at. If you’re only looking to talk to people who might use your services and you’re trying to highlight your expertise, you might find yourself starting to struggle for something new to say pretty quickly. 

However, let’s say that you want to do that, and talk about financial matters in general. If you’re ready to give your opinion on the status of the stock market, the price of oil, the trading of commodities, CEO compensation, or whatever the latest bit of news is that’s out there, now you’ve given yourself a chance to succeed for a long time because every day there’s something going on that’s fodder for your commentary. Broadening the area of the topic you want to focus on is a key to longevity.

I met a guy a few weeks ago who said he wanted to write a blog, but didn’t want to give opinions because he didn’t want to lead people one way or another. Blogs are either for opinions or dissemination of news; everything else ends up as articles, white papers or tech manuals. If you want people to consistently come to your blog, you have to not only give them information, but there has to be a level of entertainment. You have to be interesting; think about which teachers were your favorite in school. In history class, did you want a teacher who just gave you what came straight out of the book, or the teacher who would intersperse stories that helped bring situations and people to life (having fun memories of one particular history teacher right now)?

So, in review, decide what you want to write about, pick a topic that’s broad enough to give you enough to talk about for a long time, and be interesting. Oh yeah, one more thing; have fun with it, and think of it as fun, because if you think of it as work or as a necessity, you’ll crash and burn quickly. Even with business blogs, you’re allowed to be irreverent every once in awhile; I know I certainly am.