7 Tips for Bloggers
In the same vein as the 7 tips for Podcasting (and with the same hubris and drunken bravado that fuelled that previous post) let me force some more unsolicited advice on an uncaring internet:
Seven Tips for Quasi-Successful Blogging.
1. Blogging isn’t writing.
Oh, it sure looks like writing, but one can just post links, or original art, or embed videos, or even set up a bot to steal the first couple of paragraphs of other people’s carefully-crafted blog posts, with a link, and as far as the internet is concerned it still looks, walks, and quacks like a blog.
unless your name is John Scalzi, I don’t even think you can make the argument that blogging is writing practice — and John’s professional writing is world’s away (Sci-fi; so I mean that literally) from whatever -even though both are entertaining. There are two different skill sets, and the blog post is a new form that doesn’t exactly or correctly correspond to previous literary forms ( of similar length: serialized novel, short story, poetry) and so, it’s not writing.
[one can blog poetry & short stories, or even publish a novel in serial form on a blog because the-blog-as-platform is quite flexible — but now you’re considering blogging-as-publishing models — and blogging still isn’t writing.]
2. Blogging isn’t journalism.
Sure, journalists can blog. And the results are grand.
And bloggers can blog about the news of the day — and offer opinions, commentary, and in-depth analysis of that news. Sometimes, that analysis (like, say, fivethirtyeight.com) is even better than news, since without the constraints of the page or the limits of both editorial and ownership, a blogger can say what she likes for as long as she likes and can use the new form to link to extended sources, obscure resources, other blogs, or even the ‘real’ output of ‘real’ journalists that happens to be published to the web (provided some luddite who doesn’t understand the new public dialog hasn’t thrown up a paywall or pulled the newspaper article entirely).
In some ways, blogging can be better than journalism. And eventually, blogging may evolve into the sort of publicly-trusted role now occupied by journalists. It’s going to take time, though, and so long as serious news blogs still have to compete with, say, kittyhell.com for the attention of the audience, we’re not there yet.
[of course, this exact match up — news vs entertainment — has plagued every media ever invented. And the related issues when it comes to news — trust, veracity, significance, depth — are things which must be either earned from or proven to an audience. —you can insert your own Fox News/MSNBC/liberal media/vast-right-wing-conspiracy jokes here—
Trust is to be earned one person at a time. Blogs are still in early stages yet; to commit the sin of quoting myself, “to completely discard out of hand the efforts of internet writers as amateurish and non-professional (which, admittedly a lot of it is) is the same as only looking at the history of newspapers from 1605 to 1700.”
The potential is there, but we’re not journalists yet.]
3. Blog What You Know.
Yes, I’m just trotting out hoary advice that was old when the ‘penguin joke’ was young, and may even date back to a much earlier epoch when the penguin joke was actually considered to be funny.
Write what you know.
Now, you might say to yourself, “All I do is get drunk and watch TV every night.”
Actually, that concept (let’s call it drunkville) has a potential audience some hundred- or thousand-times bigger than the meagre readership of this blog.
“All I do is eat pizza”
If you compulsively seek out new pizza places around town, and review them, and are serious about pizza, then hell: you have a blog.
“All I do is read the anime and watch the manga” [sic]
You’re in good company.
“All I do is watch sports”
Heck, you don’t just have a blog, you might have a job waiting at the local AM Fan radio station!
“All I do is bitch about random stuff, without offering solutions.”
…So Say We All.
Blog what you know. Keep at it. You’ll either find your audience (or it will find you) or you’ll get bored and move on. But for every bored quitter, there’s a failblog or a cakewrecks, or a fark — and some of these tossers have book deals.
4. Feed the Dog.
There’s a vaguely remembered blog post from a couple years back that is going to take me an inordinate amount of time to track down again (and I gave it a shot, but in the three? years since I first read it there have been a whole lotta web sites using the search terms ‘blog’ and ‘feed’ in an increasingly casual manner; Google can not help in this instance)
Anyway, said columnist pointed out that a blog is a lot like a dopey Labrador Retriever: you have to exercise it, and you have to feed it once a day. [think of a blog as a really complicated tamogotchi, if you don’t play with it and feed it, it dies]
Even if all you can manage is a short link-blogging post, or a funny video, you should post something daily, to give your regular readers a reason to come back.
Daily.
[you’ll note I don’t follow my own advice on this one.]
5. There are no limits:
I mean, *I* blog about retail, publishing, manga, comics; on odd occasions I’ll take a stab at politics or just the plain funny…
6. But Keep On Topic.
…and all that said, I still “Blog what I know” and almost all posts are related, in a broad manner: If I post about politics, it’s about copyright issues; if I blog about popular culture, it’s either a book or based on a book; and no matter what else I write about — in the end it boils down to Books. I love books. I sell books for a living, I compulsively read—and buy—books to the extent that storage becomes a major issue and no matter what other noises I might make about anime (-adaptations of books) or TV (-adaptations of books) or movies (can you guess?) it all comes back to my first true love.
If you blog long enough (I’m on year 6, personally) then both your passion and topic will become clear to you.
And Keep It Fun.
Almost all of us aren’t paid to blog. We only do it so long as it keeps us amused, and even the paid contingent of bloggers are only able to maintain their high level of output because, on some level, they’re having fun. [that, or they’re true professionals who can write entertaining articles on any topic just because it’s their job and frankly, if true, that scares me a bit]
I have a full time job. It wears me out. I barely have time to keep up with everything I’d like to write about, but I keep blogging because I want to share, and because (even if I occasionally complain about the time commitment the blog requires) I’m still having fun doing it.
