Advice to Bloggers

~ Laura

Alright, I'm still thinking about the blogging conference that I went to this weekend. Let me throw out five minutes of advice. 

1. Content is king. Yes, a nice blog layout is nice, but you know how many pretty blogs with boring content that I return to the following day? Zero. Sure, it's good to advertise your blog on Twitter and Facebook and you may have thousands of friends, but if your content is boring, nobody is reading it. Even your twitter friends who faithfully RT your posts are not reading it. 

2. How do you write good content? You have know a lot about something. You have spend five, eight, even ten hours a day thinking about it. Maybe it's yoga or running or politics or gardening. Whatever your topic, you have to live it and breathe it and write about it. Also, if you write often, your writing tends to improve. 

3. You have to pick an unusual topic. I have seen zillions and zillions of blogs that have the "Bad Mommy" theme. You couldn't pay me to read another blog post about a mom who throws caution to the wind and lets her child watch TV for A WHOLE HOUR. God, what a rebel. I might read a blog post about a mom who throws caution to the wind and has an affair with the contractor. That would be different. But better yet, how about a mom who writes about her deep knowledge of Hostas or libraries or wind currents? 

4. Notice how Twitter spent years developing a great product before monitizing. That's smart. Advertising, especially annoying advertising, decreases your street cred. A little is fine, but keep it in control. 

5. Think about your long term goals. A blog should be a means to an end. A friend blogged at a political blog for a couple of years. Her topic was very narrow, so it didn't build a huge audience. Still, she cornered the market on that narrow topic and the other experts on that topic knew all about her. A good thing. Other people use their blog to promote their other work – seminars, artwork, journalism, novels. 

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “Advice to Bloggers”

  1. I’m thinking an affair with the contractor in the library sounds perfect. I’ll be beefing up my library knowledge before I look for that cute contractor.

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  2. I’m thinking an affair with a contractor sounds good if it would lead to GETTING THINGS FIXED AROUND THE HOUSE! As in, “Who do I have to sleep with around here to get the front hallway painted?”

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  3. I’m not going to start a blog about it, but if you want to kill a Hosta, dig deep or go straight to chemicals. I dug one up and tossed it over the wall. Now it’s growing on the other side of a wall. In another case, I dug one up and covered the ground with landscaping fabric. It found a way through and is now huge.

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  6. I’d add 6. Set your standards and adhere to them. I’ve seen a lot of blogs start off with one intention and then the free gift card, trip, etc. comes calling and suddenly it’s “well just ONE post about this” and “just ONE post about that” (usually prefaced with “I don’t usually do/recommend/accept this but…) and then the focus shifts.
    Like I said on the swag post, briefly, I’ve come to realize that for some people, getting the swag/review copies/gift cards/etc. really IS part of the goal or the fun, and that really is okay. (It’s my view that they should disclose, and in the US they have to. But I mean deciding whether to do it or not.)

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  8. “Also sadly my writing has unimproved but that is probably just me.”
    But you’re more fluent, right?

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