Starting a Blog

During a recent hangout session, I mentioned contributing to established blogs. Suppose you and your classmates are required to participate in an extracurricular activity or given an assignment to make a presentation. During the course of the assignment or activity you could take mental brakes and recollect all the highs, lows and everywhere in between  moments that brought you to accomplish the finished product.  Like a report within the report or activity.

Putting together this series of unpublished posts, scheduled posts, or leaving posts in draft to be published later could open a door for you to become a guest blogger for your local or national newspaper, topic specific blog sites with paid contributors like the ones mentioned in this post along with others like +Writer's Digest or +Grist.  These publishers want to stay on the cutting edge of their business. By you showing your interest in them you just may find a powerful voice that you never knew you had. 

Use the Google Plus feature Circle share to your advantage for seeking out potential guest blogging opportunities.

Starting a Blog

Depending on the site you choose, take advantage of the utility pages on the platforms site. These pages are usually simple to follow and easy to search specific questions. Except for the Facebook notes feature, the following allow you to add Gadgets to your page linking other site profiles in the form of HTML  You can also include someone else as a contributor to your blog from most of these sites.

Wordpress  has a neat add on wiget that can be linked to your blog providing prompt based writing topics from Plinky.com. With a wordpress blog, you are able to choose the default page a post is filed under. 

Tumblr looks neat.  Popular with photographers it seems to me.

Facebook everyone's got a Facebook page.  Did you know you could blog on it?

Weebly offers a free and paid version of their service.

Blogger is my platform of choice.   

Game Informer lets you create a simple journal style blog.

Make the most of your mental real estate space. Take a look around the web at different blogs and make a note of what your experience is like. Do you get lost immediately? Aside from grammatical errors does the information come across as easy to follow? When a blog displays the view count of each post or other stat information, do you feel as if your visit is less meaningful? How important are timestamps and location information to you on a post? Has the blogger included this information? What about archived posts? How are those sorted? Is that important?

Don't ever forget that the Internet is a powerful tool. It can make a scholar seem dumb and simpletons seem brilliant. 

Starting a Blog

Finding your blogging niche is critical to maintaining the vitality of your blog. Assume you've got past the first step of deciding the theme of your blog. Now we need to decide how you prefer to write. Are you tech savvy? Would you be more likely to keep hand-written drafts? Since we've already decided that you're an athletic movie-critic/photo-blogger, all you need to do is follow these steps in blogger to upload by attachment your mobile photos via email, choose whether you're posting immediately to your blog or if you want to add written notes later and voilà, a post is generated.

Now challenged yourself with generating a blog post per day or every couple days for the next several weeks. That's a great start. One day write about the movies you watched on the weekend or plan to see soon, the likeness of your professor or coach to the character on Office Space, whatever. The next day snap a picture of your books sprawled out over the desk, your friend parked in your driveway and the graded paper from class. Don't post/share/im it right away, instead hand write a few lines about how you're so glad the alarm went off on time so you didn't need to take the bus to practice. How you aced the first quiz in macro economics because you studied. Keep it simple, don't try to become a professional overnight.

Keep in mind this is still just a hobby. Use this to your advantage. Don't forget to allow yourself enough time for tweaking. All this means is once you've got a picture and written down a couple notes by hand putting the pieces together on your blog page will take about ten minutes to share a quality blog post.

Starting a Blog

Blogging has its setbacks just like any other hobby. When someone decides to take their hobby to the next level, some road maps for success should be researched.  Before diving head first into expectations of overnight success, simply decide what the theme of your blog will be.  Keep yourself on track.  Ask yourself some questions to get started.  Like these:

Do you write poetry? Are you bothered by the minimum wage discussion? Has anyone ever mentioned that you look like someone famous? Are you the go to person among your group of friends to solve a dilemma? Do you need to study some, allot, or not at all before taking a test to get an A? Is there something unique about your demographics or heritage? Are you a secret admirer? Are you looking foreword to a special occasion? Do people compliment you on what you wear? Do you play an instrument? What songs do you like listening to?  What food do people demand only you can bring to social gatherings?  Do you have a favorite radio station? Are you constantly taking photos? Do you spend time visiting particular sites on the Internet? Do you have a video game console? What kind of games do you like playing on it? Have you recently lost a loved one? Do you read magazine articles and/or book reviews regularly? Is your household geared toward following certain teams during basketball, football, soccer, baseball, hockey, etc. season? Are you an athlete, educator, or movie enthusiast?

Now that you've figured out for instance that- you like to snap photos during your daily commute to football practice -or- find yourself over reacting to the recommendations your friend gave you about a movie-Lets get ready to start a blog.

Take a moment to write down on paper some details about your existing social network profiles like passwords, screen names, email accounts and other log in information you might need to refer back to.  Having this info written down will save time later on.  

Now walk away.  Don't let your welcome wear off.  Treat your blog like a newly found treasure.  Wait.  Before you walk away jot down my page address and come back soon for the next installment of Starting a Blog!   

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