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Series Introduction:

Want to bring more traffic to your website by adding a blog? Or not quite ready for a website but want to start building your name and attracting an audience with a blog alone? This series explains how to launch a blog if you’ve never had one—or take your current blog to an all-new level. Articles include blog basics such as platforms and design, pros and cons of solo blogging and group blogging, blogging ethics and etiquette, and the all-important question of writing and content. Also coming up in future articles: tips for marketing and promoting on your blog, creating traffic-building interest, developing your unique blogging style, time management for blogging, setting your blogging boundaries, and beating bloggers’ block.

Lesson One:

The word blog is short for web log (weblog). A blog is also known as an online journal or web diary. In the most common format, a blog is chronologically organized with the latest entry appearing at the top of the page. It is updated by an individual (or a group of individuals), and contains a title, the body of the post, a date/timestamp showing when it was posted, and various, nearly limitless possibilities for additions such as plugins, sidebars, links, images and tools.

There are two general purposes for a blog. One is for personal reasons, and the other is for business. What I’ll be addressing in this series is blogging for business purposes, and specifically, blogging as a writer. For writers, blogging is a way to communicate and network—with fellow writers and with readers, reviewers, even industry professionals. Blogging also provides a fast, easy, and inexpensive (free or nearly free) way to promote your name, your books, and your career. And even while blogging as a writer falls under the general category of blogging for business, there are personal benefits as well—relationships are developed and deepened through blogging interactions, and there can be a personally creative satisfaction found in it. Even non-writing friends and relatives may enjoy following your business blog to keep up with you, particularly if you combine some selected personal material in your business blog. For example, I talk in my blog about my children quite a bit. Friends and relatives follow my blog for the pictures and anecdotes about the children. Do I tell everything about my personal life in my blog? No. My blog is for business, and I use stories about my family as part of the style of my blog, which is something visitors have come to expect in my blog and is a tool I use to attract and entertain them. Attracting and entertaining readers to return again and again is a business purpose to strengthen my name recognition. Using your personal life for business purposes means taking care not to reveal too much in order to protect your privacy and the privacy of your family—but revealing something of your personal life is also what will give your blog authenticity. You must be willing to reveal something of yourself, in selected degrees, in order to touch readers. Just as we strive to touch readers in our books, we must strive to touch readers in our blogs. This doesn’t mean getting emotional or baring all. It just means—be who you are, using a certain amount of judgment in order to maintain your privacy.

Blogging can attract traffic and maintain it, and thus help you build your name recognition. For writers, name recognition (which, besides writing a great book, is the foundation of great sales) is crucial. If you’re already published and if you already have a website, adding an interactive, constantly changing feature such as a blog is what will bring that traffic that can enhance name recognition. If you aren’t published yet and even if you don’t have a website, a blog alone can be the building block of your future. For me, blogging impacted the traffic to my website enormously. I was multi-published and had a website for about seven years before I started a blog. I got a few hundred visitors a month to my website. Over the past few years since I started blogging, I’ve watched that relatively stagnant traffic of a couple hundred visitors a month grow to thousands of visitors per month. I know unpublished authors and new authors who have had similar results in increasing traffic using a blog.

In the next article, we’ll discuss finding your “style” as a blogger as we dig deeper into what makes a great blog—and how you can create one of your own.

The Writer’s Blog Workshop Series Lessons: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

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Tags: How to Blog, Marketing, Series Articles, The Writer's Blog Workshop //