Authors – The Art of Blogging
Choose Your Niche – Share Information, Don’t Make it a “Me” Atmosphere
Blogging is such a huge topic and if you were to search “how to blog”, “how to create a blog”, you would find a great deal of information to help you, and I suggest you do this because I believe we learn something every day.
I do believe blogging is a needed tool and it’s a whole new language. There are many platforms, and the largest is WordPress .com and .org. The .com is free and the .org usually comes with a monthly fee. There are others such as, Drupal, Typepad, Blogsmith.
There are pros and cons to using either the free (.com) or paid (.org) versions of WordPress and it’s really up to you on which one you wish to use, both are productive in blogging. Some of the pros going the free route are that it’s free and easy to set up. The technical maintenance, such as upgrades, spam, backups, and security are all taken care of, which is a plus. Your blog will be on hundreds of servers and will remain available under high traffic.
Some of the cons for .com are, although you can choose from over 200+ themes, which you can customize; you won’t be able to upload a custom theme you may have designed. You won’t be able to upload your own plugins, which is a tool that can be added to enhance the blogging performance or provide added features.
For me, I chose the .com of WordPress simply because I am a novice in understanding the mechanics behind running a blog. Plus, I always like when something is free and easy, because let’s face it, we prefer to be writing, don’t we? There are two processes behind blogging, one would be the way you blog on your site and the other is posting or blogging on other sites.
I’d like to first discuss making posts on other blogs. The first step would be to find blogs that cater to your audience, knowledge, or genre of your writing. This can include fiction and nonfiction. Once you have found a blog, please be mindful and actually read what the topic is about and what others have posted. The real art of blogging is to actually care about your blog posts and to create credibility on your part. You do not want to begin “spamming” about yourself when it has nothing to do about the topic.
Leave a comment that is useful for others by sharing links to other helpful blogs, share your own knowledge, and answer any questions that you feel you have information about because we are all out there to help others. This should be your main goal in all of your marketing platforms.
The next part of blogging is how you post on your blog and what type of information you share. Naturally our first instinct is to talk about our books, events, book signings, and reviews, and that’s all well and good, but if you want to increase a following, you really need to share helpful information. Even if you aren’t really sure if you have the knowledge base to post about what you know, then share links of other bloggers who have some great information. If you find a blog that talks about writing a query, leave a comment that you loved reading about this post and ask if it’s okay to share on your blog. Nine times out of ten they won’t have a problem. This is where relationships begin and it will increase your credibility.
Next you’re probably wondering how often you should blog, and that’s entirely up to you, but what I’ve learned over the last several years is that a weekly post works well. You can post more or less depending on how much time you have, but the main thing to do is…post. This is where you can get creative and it gives you another venue in which to write, and that’s always good.
Always be mindful and courteous in your responses, no matter what types of comments are left. You never want to enter into an argument in any area of marketing; it’s just not worth it. But the main thing to do is have fun and enjoy sharing your thoughts and ideas, but have a main focus on what you wish to blog about, and of course, every now and again, post about your new book coming out, because after all, you do want to establish new readers.
