Blogging Pointers

Good morning bloggers. As you can see below, BloggingPointers.com has been vacant since September. Well, I’m here to change that!

Here’s what I can offer you:

Daily Updates
Veteran Professional Blogger (see profile) WITH great tips
Open community (ie I don’t know everything so jump in!)
Great place for NEW and OLD bloggers alike
Make Some Money MONDAYS (ie a listing of PAID blog positions)

And last, but certainly not least, a chance to be in my blogroll! If you’ve got a blog about blogging, web writing, internet biz, internet apps, or internet publicity, I want to add you to my blogroll! Leave a comment or email me at gwpublications@gmail.com!

Let’s start today with TIP O’ the TUESDAY:

As I mentioned in one of my other blogs, Writers Unbound, always be very careful of what you publish in your blog. Things like short stories, personal essays and even exposes have the possibility of netting you some dollars, not to mention a great print credit, when published in another media. But, once they are up on your blog, some outlets will consider them already published, and you will not be able to sell them.

Of course, this turns into a careful balancing technique, as you need- need- excellent content in order to get your blog rolling.

Thanks for visiting Tip O’ the Tuesday, and again, give me some ideas for BLOGROLL!

Beginner bloggers, beware the category trap!

It’s all too easy to start going a little crazy with those categories after a few posts. Usually, the first several posts are all assigned to one of only a few categories, but then something happens. It’s almost as if the blogger’s plug gets yanked, and suddenly it seems that the posts in the blogger’s head need ever more discrete and finely tuned categories. And the result? Almost always unhappy - way too many categories, categories that are ill-defined and duplicative, or categories that are way too narrowly drawn.

Spend some time at the outset thinking about your categories. How many do you really need? I would suggest starting with no more than ten. Craft them carefully; think ahead about your posts and your subject matter.

One approach is to create a broad-stroke outline of your subject matter. If you were writing a book, what would your chapter titles be? Write them down on paper, or in a text file. Play with them a bit. Aim for a little bit of parallelism (though strict symmetry certainly isn’t required).

Whatever you do, try to avoid what usually happens to beginner bloggers - call it putting the cart before the horse: draft a post, then write a category title. That way madness and haphazard categorization lie.

Finally, don’t confuse categories with tags! Use plugins like The Ultimate Tag Warrior to define and label your posts in more narrow ways; let your categories serve their purpose which is to group them according to subtopic.

If there’s one piece of advice beginning bloggers hear over and over, ad nauseam, it’s got to be ‘Find your niche!’ I wonder if it’s being touted so pervasively that we risk beginners defining their scopes so narrowly that their blogs begin to cave in on them?

Let’s take my most recent independent venture, Fibro Follies, as an example. I could have narrowed the site’s theme - “thriving with fibromyalgia” - even further, of course. I could have targeted alternative therapies for the illness. I could have focused strictly on women over 40 who’ve recently been diagnosed. I could have even narrowed it down to “women over 40, recently diagnosed, who want to combine conservative and alternative therapies and are looking for productivity and energy management tips.”

Phew.

But I kept it pretty open - “people with fibromyalgia who want to do more than just survive, and who want a higher quality of life.” The reason is simple: I’m sick of fibro advocates creating this picture in the public’s mind of those of us with fibro as bedridden and incompetent women who must be cared for. I know the aim was, initially, to show people that it was a real disease. The pendulum swung too far over, however, and this blog is my attempt to bring some hope back to the “fibromite” who wants more out of life and isn’t ready to take to her or his bed yet.

By keeping this blog’s focus fairly open, I’ve created a wide world of potential topics. I can write about alternative therapies, new treatments, medical trials, coping and healing tips, psychological and self-improvement programs, journaling, relationships, nutrition - but all as related to improving quality of life for a fibro patient. This is a scope that isn’t likely to cave in on me and suffocate the blog in its infancy.

Consider what might have happened had I selected a narrower niche - let’s say “alternative therapies.” Well, right away I’m turning away the 30% or so of patients who only consider traditional medicine (that’s a number based strictly on personal anecdotes and experience - which is to say, completely made up - but, still, there are some folks like that, and they wouldn’t read a blog devoted to alternative therapies). I’m also locking myself in; what happens when I’ve exhausted the scope of alternative therapies? I’ll need to resurrect old topics, or find new twists. That’s completely do-able, mind you, but - and this is my point - why make things harder on myself?

The single biggest ingredient for a successful blog isn’t content, as some would have you believe - it’s blogger passion. With that passion, you’ll find the content, you’ll do the work necessary to make the traffic find you, and you’ll keep posting daily as you know you need to. But it’s hard to maintain the passion when you’re so narrowly boxed in to a topic that you run through it in a month or two. Keep the passion alive for your blog the same way you would for your spouse or partner - by finding new things to love!