Tips for Blogging From a Daily Blogger

By Michael H. on February 16, 2012

Early last August, I finished a year-long project that I had begun on my own to test my resolve about being a journalism major. I decided that once per day, I would post something relevant to an interesting thought that I had that day. Now, having completed it, I have 404 posts that are all somewhat quite lengthy and I learned a lot about the blogging process.

photo on flickr.com, uploaded by http://www.flickr.com/photos/spadgy/313251851/

I usually don’t provide many tips for bloggers, because I don’t consider myself an expert. However, a friend pointed out that I had a wealth of experience from my continuous use of blogging platforms. My personal challenge ended up on Blogger/Blogspot, but I now have pretty extensive use with Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr.

First off, blogging is not very rewarding. It’s nice when people leave you great comments but those are few and far between. Sometimes you will go weeks or months without getting a positive comment. Most of the comments people give you are actually negative, because people are more likely to complain than they are to praise. If you crave attention then blogging isn’t really for you. It requires patience and quite often a good amount of research for posts that will be under-appreciated. I found it infuriating at first when all the posts I had worked hard on with good content weren’t getting very many views compared to what I viewed as the posts with less value. This leads me into my second tip…

According to the Missouri Group’s “News Reporting and Writing”, three criteria are used to determine a story’s relative worth: relevance, usefulness and interest. When writing a blog post that’s what you want to think about. There are a lot of people in the world and the majority of them don’t really care what you have to say. Write about something you think people will care about, as well as something you care about. Passion is necessary in a blog and usually a reader can tell if the writing is being forced or not.

Keep your audience in mind and play nice in the sandbox. Never say something about a group of people that you think readers might misconstrue as an insult, even if it has some comedic value. People won’t laugh at something they feel is very important in their lives. This is why that character on television who is sarcastically funny is stilled viewed as a jerk by the other characters. In reality, people want someone who is going to agree with them; they don’t want someone who is going to piss on their altar.

Lastly, if you want people to look at your blog you have to disseminate it. Post it to your Twitter account, your Facebook account, your other blogs, or anything else you can think of where friends might view it. You have to bring your writing to your audience, not the other way around. Learn how to use hashtags in your tweets so that users looking for those keywords will be lead to your post. Usually, line-up your hashtags with the tags you’ve applied to the post itself (every blogging platform has a way of adding these) so that these terms are twice as frequent. Start a Facebook fan page if you really want a page devoted solely to your writing and think it will help you reach more people. There is really no end to the amount of viral marketing you can do. Just keep in mind that people don’t want your blog clogging up their social media, so keep the updates reasonable.

The most important part is just to have fun with what you’re writing. If you’re not enjoying it. then don’t write it. The world is full of enough bad literature as it stands.

(I’m debating starting a “mini-series” of informative posts about blogging, if you’re actually interested in that let me know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading!)

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