(As published in the Racquette newspaper)
When I first heard about blogging I was under the impression that it was simply a narcissistic public journal fad, intended for people with nothing better to do with their lives.
Years later, I have a far greater appreciation for blogs and bloggers. I’ve started my own blogs and subscribe to many others via RSS feeds. My first impression of blogging was only a narrow snapshot of what the general blogosphere is filled with.
There are blogs about everything. Chances are if there’s a book for it, there’s a blog for it. There are plenty of people writing about boring day-to-day activities but there are far more writing informative posts on a multitude of topics.
Some people are actually professional bloggers. They often maintain more than one blog or have one very successful blog utilizing advertising space in the margins of their page. Many popular blogs have multiple writers focusing on individual segments of content.
If you manage to find a niche in the blogosphere, in which you have a certain amount of expertise, you may find that many people visit your blog on a regular basis. If this is the case, it’s actually possible to monetize your blog by offering advertising space. Businesses related to the content of your blog are likely to be interested in advertising, depending on the amount of traffic your blog receives.
Bloggers often use “tags” to classify content within individual posts. These tags make searching for specific content in the vast array of blogs online much easier. Correctly tagging posts can mean the difference between content being viewed by ten people or one hundred.
In addition to appropriately tagging specific posts, linking directly to related content and similar blogs can help increase traffic and connect a blog to other sources. This helps to build reputation and awareness.
The key to establishing a successful blog is maintaining the notion that you are contributing to a community. In order to connect a blog to a community, techniques such as developing relationships with other blogs and making yours easy to find are very important, but offering content that is new and interesting is paramount.
There are four main types of blogs: Personal, corporate/organizational, genre-based and media. Blogging is something that anyone with Internet access can do at no cost. Blog service websites such as WordPress.org and Blogger.com allow users to create fully functional blogs with customizable themes. Users can keep track of analytical data related to their blog from a central “dashboard.” It’s possible and relatively inexpensive to register .com domains for freely hosted blogs to provide a more professional looking web address.
It is often recommended that, if you plan to maintain a high quality of standards for your blog, you create an outline-or even a business plan of sorts-to organize the structure of your blog. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype and forget that quality content is what counts.
There is a wide range of benefits associated with blogging. Blogging can help connect people who might not normally have been aware of each other. Writing blog posts can also help you maintain your writing skills when you’re not in school. The key is to treat every blog post as you would an essay for a class: fact check, edit, spell check, et cetera.
Blogs do not necessarily have to focus on text-based content. Many people maintain photo, video, and design blogs which simply showcase their work and the work of others.
Filed under: Racquette Articles, Social Media Tagged: | Blogging, Social Media, Web 2.0
