Jan
12
How to Create a Successful Blog - Part 1
January 12, 2009 |
By Christine Barry
I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned in my last 4 years of blogging. Specifically, I’d like to take you through the steps necessary to build a successful blog, and spare you some of the mistakes that I’ve made along the way. I’ve broken this down into a five part series:
- ·Determine your purpose
- ·Define success
- ·The mechanics of a blog
- ·Networking
- ·Measuring your progress
This is Part 1: determine your purpose.
For this discussion, let’s start with the following assumptions:
- ·You understand what blogging is and you’ve made the decision to get started.
- ·You do care what people think of your ideas.
- ·Blogging is more than a social activity; you want to get something out of it.
If you’re new to blogging, you are probably anxious to get started right away, but there’s a lot of planning that goes in to creating a successful blog.
The first thing that you should do is give some thought to your purpose. Answer the question, Why am I doing this? Are you blogging to share an experience? To expose corruption? To correct an injustice? Is this a hobby or is it activism?
You may come up with more than one answer to this question, and the answer may change over time. I never asked myself this question when I started blogging politics at the end of 2004. The result was that my blog was angry and unfocused. I was shouting into the wind and I was sure that no one was reading. By 2006 I had learned that people were reading, and that it was a really bad idea to blog angry. By 2008 I understood why I was blogging and how I could be effective. My blog had focus, and I was writing with passion rather than anger.
If you want to be an effective blogger, you must understand why you are blogging. The answer to this question will help you identify your allies, determine a strategy, and focus your writing. It is also necessary to help you define the success of your blog, which is the topic of the next article.
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