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| Bloggers Boot Camp |
John Biggs and Charlie White, have just released a book about
blogging called Bloggers Boot Camp . These gents produced tens of
thousands of posts between them, written for some of the biggest names
in blogging, and are generally good blokes. Their goal in this to teach
how to write for blogs.
This isn’t a book on starting a Tumblr or a
WordPress.com. "It’s about thinking about your blog posts in terms of
content, value, and sharing and it discusses search optimization not
through dirty tricks but through good, hard work."
The Two Rules
Ignore these two rules at your peril. Understand that blogs take on a
life of their own, and if your goal is to blog to make money, or you are
blogging as an extension of your interests or job, these two rules –
part of what we would call a “blogging plan” – are absolutely paramount.
Blogging is a job. It may be your second job but it is a process that
takes hard work and discipline. We have been blogging for almost a
decade, and it’s a constant struggle as well as a source of constant
reward. Our days begin at 8 a.m. and end whenever the last news item
flickers across our screens.
Rule 1. Always Be Blogging
The best blogs are updated daily, if not hourly. There is nothing worse
than a ghost blog, a site that seems to be updated sporadically at best.
Readers are becoming experts at sensing the freshness of content. If
you leave your blog sitting for weeks at a time with no new posts,
they’ll catch on quickly and your audience will migrate elsewhere.
Keep posting! What do you mean, there’s nothing to write about today? Of
course there is! There’s always something going on that would interest
your readers every day. Your goal is to be the person “in the know”
about all things involved in your topic. If you truly love what you’re
writing about, you won’t have any problem writing something at least
daily. If you find you’re having trouble, you may be facing a serious
problem in your choice of topic. There is no topic too mundane that you
can’t pull a post out of it. Can’t find news? Post some pictures from a
recent activity related to your topic. Talk about what other bloggers in
your niche are doing.
Prepare a round-up of news from other sources.
Your posts don’t always have to be news. They can be a personal story, a
reaction to the news of the day, or a simple link to another site with
information you enjoyed. However, if you find yourself getting lazy and
failing to post, you’ve broken the first cardinal rule of your blogging
plan.
However, don’t fall into the “personal blog post” trap. Don’t tell the
story of your problems at the DMV or your relationship issues.
Don’t
tell us what you had for dinner last night (unless you’re a food
critic), or fill us in on every detail of that dream you had last night.
Don’t spring your heartfelt musings on your unsuspecting audience. But
if you can somehow creatively weave some personal experience into your
posts, that could be the very thing that makes the story yours.
Lacking inspiration? Create a calendar for yourself and a to-do list.
Add items to the to-do list as you think of them and then add them to
the calendar.
These “evergreen” post ideas can be published at any time.
If you find yourself frustrated or facing the dreaded writer’s block,
simply go to this list of items you haven’t gotten around to yet and do
one.
That doesn’t mean you’ll have to sit in front of your computer 24 hours a
day. A lot of blogging is thinking, observing, and discovering a fresh
angle on a topic that’s already been covered elsewhere. If you keep your
blog top-of-mind, you’ll find yourself coming up with ideas wherever
you go.
Who knows where you’ll find inspiration? Beethoven went for
daily walks, and heard a bird singing the first four notes of his Fifth
Symphony. Occurrences, people, objects and new experiences that have
great potential to be turned into blog posts are everywhere, and it’s up
to you to tease them out, write about them, make them interesting and
grab your readers with them.
Rule 2. Post Consistently
What sort of voice will your blog have? You want readers to become
familiar with the way you do things, the way you express yourself, and
the way your blog is laid out. Do you want to do long posts, daily? Many
short posts each day? Digests of news with simple links? Videos?
There’s a variety of ways to build a blog and most of us would choose a
scattershot approach to posting daily.
However, if you find you enjoy
writing longer posts, you may want to stick with that style. It gives
your readers plenty to chew on on a regular basis, and you can still add
shorter posts in between. Establish your style at the beginning, and
keep it consistent.
Having a style doesn’t mean you have to be snarky, mean, or silly. It
means you need to be clear, concise, and you need to stand out in a vast
sea of “me-too” content. Be the person people link to when they want to
prove a point. Be the expert other experts trust when it comes to
matters of technical accuracy.
Pride yourself on a consistent and
readable style. And make it sound like you.
However long your posts will be, it’s most important to decide on a
writing style. Will you embrace vulgarity with your site, cussing like a
sailor in every sentence, or will you be prim and proper? Will you
attack your topics with sarcasm and snark, or will you play it straight?
Will you have a happy, carefree and uplifting approach, or will you
incite your readers to share your anger? Will you find a way to be
different, standing out from the crowd of blogs blanketing the earth
with your dazzling insights?
Maybe you’re funny. However, comedy, as they say, is hard.
One of the
pitfalls we’ve seen in new bloggers attempting a snarky style is the
descent into meanness for meanness’s sake. When you focus on a topic
with any intensity, you “go native” and allow things to affect you more
than they should. The antidote to this is to write everything in a hard
news style or a more conversational style. Also avoid lashing out at
figures and major players in your niche. And remember, a bit of
self-deprecating humor and personality goes a long way.
Don’t forget to make it personal. The one thing the “big newsrooms”
can’t do is inject personality into their work. Sure, there are some
exceptions, but on the aggregate many news sites are stale and boring by
dint of their mission. Will this be a log of your experiences and
opinions? Unless you’re going to be simply rewriting news stories, or
doing straight reporting, you’ll probably insert many of your
experiences and opinions into your writing. In the early days of
blogging, much of the writing was a lot like the early days of Twitter,
where writers would talk about everyday trivialities such as what they
just ate for breakfast.
Now, writers have taken it way beyond that
level, by orders of magnitude. If you’re a solo act, let the readers
inside, bare your soul. That’s entertainment!
If you’re writing a blog with a group of colleagues, your blog style
will need to reflect the fact that there is a group of people working
together. Referring to yourself as “we” is probably the best idea here,
but that’s not to say you can’t use the proverbial “we” when you’re
writing a solo blog, either.
This is an important element of your blog
style: Will you write is a group or as a collection of individuals? You
can choose whether each post will reflect the separate opinions and
attitudes of individual writers, where all the writers in your group
strive to set themselves apart. Or, you can work as an editorial team,
akin to how newspapers editorial boards write, and speak as a group.
We’ve asked you a lot of questions in this first chapter, and we would
suggest you carefully contemplate each one and come up with solid
answers for yourself. Be honest. If you do this, you’ll be on a sturdy
foundation for starting up a successful enterprise. After you’ve gone
through that period of self-examination, you might be thinking this
sounds like a lot of work. You would be right. In fact, writing might
seem easy to you, but the daily dedication needed for a successful blog
is hard. You must summon all your energy and enthusiasm, applying a
steady and dedicated work ethic to this venture. Set yourself realistic
goals, and meet them every day, and you’d be surprised how even a small
amount of work – applied consistently – will turn a series of seemingly
small efforts into a monumental achievement......
| Posted by Azziet Singh follow me on twitter |
