Sharing About Blogging

Having chosen to accept The Ultimate Blog Challenge to post a new blog each day through the month of January, today I'll address my experience of actually doing just that for a whole week.

Most helpful is an email sent every day with suggested prompts to consider by Paul Taubman.  However, at times, my muse refuses to consider those suggestions. Other times, I'll read in his email the exact same idea that came to mind the previous evening.

For me, the challenge is in coming up with topics to write about that others would find interesting to read. One strategy I've developed is to keep my Blogger.com page open on the computer at all times. It makes it easy for me to sit and jot down a partial draft to be expanded later during my normal writing time. Kind of like keeping paper and pen beside your bed to capture those brilliant ideas that come in the night.

Here are some helpful hints I came across that I try to keep in mind:

1. Be interesting.
2. Be conversational — raise questions, invite contributions, discuss what’s happening on other blogs, leave some loose ends, and respond to comments made by readers.
3. Link to external sites with relevant information.
4. Monitor other bloggers in the same space and attempt to build reciprocal links with them.
5. Tag posts so that they are easy for search engines to find.
6. Inject some personality into posts, and include observation and anecdote.
7. Credit the original source of all content embedded in posts.
8. Make use of multimedia whenever possible and think about a post’s layout.
9. Make sure posts are seen by a second pair of eyes before publication.
10. Place a link to blog posts on relevant social media.

 I may be forced to dig out those pages of suggested blog topics buried somewhere in my desk drawer.