You Ready to Blog?
Congratulations - you’ve decided you want to give blogging a try! Where do you start? First you need to decide on a venue. If you already have a website, that might be the ideal place to blog. Looking beyond that, you’ll find a number of easy-to-use websites to blog on; some are free and some are relatively inexpensive. I hear Blogger.com is popular as there is no cost and it is easy for even non-technologically-savvy writers to use. In five minutes you can be up and blogging. Blogger.com and WordPress.com are the two major blogging websites and have the largest user databases but there are others to consider. Check out Weebly.com, yola.com, LiveJournal.com, TypePad.com, tumblr.com (especially handy for photo bloggers), and posterous.com (ideal for those with many social media avenues), among many others. The Internet is always changing as you know so by the time you read this, there may be new blogging sites that are user-friendly to add to this list.
If you want to get blogging, set up an action plan. List the topics or titles of the first six or seven blog posts, more if you can. Then look at your schedule and figure out how blogging fits into your life. Some people blog daily whereas others blog once a month or less. When deciding how frequently to blog, keep in mind that it is more important to be a consistent blogger (whether it’s once a day, week, or month) than to be sporadic. Try to avoid blogging five times in one week and then once the following month.
When writing your blog posts, remember that like with all writing, readers will come back if they like your writing style and your voice. Match your tone to your topic and let your personality shine through. Engage your readers and allow them to leave comments. Interact with them on your blog’s site. Figure out why the readers are coming to read what you’ve written and meet those needs. If you doubt your blogging ability, it’s better to not blog at all until you’re ready than to do a poor job in the blogosphere.