Blogging Blog

5 Simple Tactics for Blogging Success

Today's guest poster is Damien Riley, host of the Online Diarists Forum. You will find more about Damien at the end of this post.

 

Blogging is like a Gestalt image: One person sees the vase while another sees the two faces. The trick is knowing what to look for and how to make it look that way!

In this post, I name 5 blogging challenges for any blogger and simple tactics to be successful.  At the end I share what I measure success by:

1. Ideas: I keep a small pad in my pocket. When I get ideas for blog entries, I jot them down. Sometimes I'll be on my way to work or even relaxing on a lunch break when inspiration strikes.

I have learned that a one word entry in my book is quite sufficient to recall good ideas later. I get many of these one word entries in a given day.

When I actually sit down to blog however, only one, or even none, gets through. In the long-term picture, even if only a small number of these "from the field" ideas get blogged, then you know you aren't missing the best.

2. Photos: Every photo you take off your camera or save from the web, put in a dedicated folder. This makes it easy to retrieve them. Don't just scatter them on your desktop.

When you get a lot of photos in there, archive that set into an "archive" with the date as the title. This way you always have a small number of photos to work with when you open the folder.

Be saving photos all the time. You'd be amazed how even boring pictures can be used as illustrations when they might apply to a future post. (For the advanced: Get a copy of ADOBE Photoshop and learn how to make drop shadow and frame effects.)

If I had to Start My Blog Again ~ Roundup

problogger recently organized another Group Writing Project on the topic of ‘if I had to start my blog again’. Since this promised to offer lots of useful tips for new bloggers, I decided to peruse, summarize, and excerpt to give you a flavor of each post, some of which you will want to go read in full.

This is a long post; there's a lot in here --but I remember when I started out, I wanted to read everything that might be helpful. So this is all severely edited, but I included every post. At least, I tried.

It took a long time. I can't tell you how relieved I was to see the end of that list scroll up on my screen.

Unsurprisingly, there are several themes that repeat from one post to the next, and a bit of consistent advice:

• Host your site at your own domain name, and choose both your domain name and your site title with care. I suggest a quick Google search on anything you are considering to be sure you won't be lost in a crowd. A dictionary and thesaurus search might not be a bad idea, either; you don't want your site name to have surprising connotations.
• Choose a platform that has categories and named (not numbered) URL's, so that both readers and search engines can more easily find your posts. In other words, not Blogspot/ Blogger.
• Start yesterday.
• Have fun -- if you don't have fun, your readers won't, either.
• Think ahead: what is the goal/purpose of the site? How can you increase the chance of meeting your goal?
• Learn or hire the skills to do a good (appealing and usable) design.
• Read, read, read (other blogs.)
• Comment, comment, comment (on other blogs.)

A few things that were seldom mentioned, but seem important:

•     Backup your site (umm, I keep planning to do this...)
•     Get a photo hosting account
•     Select and use a good feed reader, to keep up with other blogs

Excerpts are below the cut, but I'm going to lead with the one I already suspect will be my favorite, even though I've just begun reading. From My wabisabi blog:

  Wabisabi: (侘寂)   An aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is   “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”.

  My purpose in writing this is to encourage anyone who’s new to just take the   first step and not worry about setting up a “perfect” thing, and anyone who’s   redoing their blog not to be frustrated. We’ve already got too many other   things in life that already exert this type of pressure ... Let’s not get lost   in the numbers for once. Why not take advantage of a rare, low-risk   opportunity like blogging and approach it with a creative eagerness rather   than cautious fear about all the mistakes you might make? As long as it’s true   to you, you probably can’t go wrong. It’s worked for me.

Habits Roundup

problogger's challenge to write about the Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers has resulted in a great many thoughtful posts; mostly, of course, about professional blogging, rather than the personal and idiosyncratic blogging in which I indulge.

I was hoping for some truly eccentric suggestions. You know, like turn three times clockwise, then bow to the west twice; or put on your FEAR THE POET T-shirt, burn sage incense, chant "I am creative" thirteen times. Something.

But no, pretty much the expected good advice, with a few not-so-typical good ideas; and some of the usual, unusually well-expressed. To the extent there is a common theme, it is: Passion. Persistence. Patience. To which I would add: Play!

One writer managed twelve P's: The 12 P’s of Successful ProBlogging.

I did a very quick look-through, and offer below some brief excerpts. The excerpts are linked with Deep Quote, which, I discovered too late, links to the Deep Quote site instead of the originating site -- so I've linked each blog title to the relevant post as well -- and will use Deep Quote with more discretion in future.