Friday, March 16, 2012

How to START your blog! part 2

National Cathedral | 2007 

So you’ve chosen a blogging platform, and chosen the layout of your blog.  You wrote your first blog post and published it and you told people about it!  Great job!  But now what?... 


to read part 1 click here.  
Clearly Identify why you started blogging. What was it that got you to go through all of the work to start a blog?

Take a couple of minutes and write down the reasons you started your blog.  Save these reasons somewhere so you can easily go back and look at them.  Better yet share them in the comments!

THEME - What is your blog about? 

You probably inadvertently answered this question when you finished the exercise above.  But if you didn’t, ask yourself to sum up in a sentence or two exactly what the purpose of your blog is.

Maybe as you’re starting out you don’t need a clear vision of what you’re trying to do long term, but you should be thinking about that as you continue to blog.

I haven’t quite figured this one out for myself.  I just wanted to get back into the habit of writing and posting blogs.  I plan to really think about what this blog is becoming soon.  I promise next week, I will post a blog that sums up what this blog is all about.  

As your thinking about what your theme is consider the following: 

One of my photographer teachers and friend, Stanley Leary, says that you have to offer people something for them to keep coming back... what do you have to offer your readers?  

Or as my friend Dave Heiliger is asking recently “What is it that only YOU can do?” 

Further Customize - Add your personal touch

Make this blog your own, make sure it visually represents what you are trying to say.  

Make your blog as easily navigable as possible.  To do that you might want to follow some of these changes that I recently implemented.  

Schedule/ConsistencyFind your sweet spot, how often are you going to commit to writing?  

Jon Barnes of The Munich Group recently e-mailed me and congratulated me on my recent consistent blogging and told me that there is a huge relationship between site traffic and blogging frequency.  

Too many people have started out blogs and had a great start only to let them die out after a few posts.  I’ve been there, but lets really go for consistent blogging!  

I really enjoyed only posting 3 times last week, rather than 5.  Why?  I tried to write every day even during a busy move, and only posting 3 of them allowed me to get ahead.  

Engage:  Why did you start blogging?  Or what are some reasons you’d like to start blogging?  Tell us in the comments.  

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