Writing, Among Other Things
Blogging, it seems, has now become a yearly ritual for me. Come 1st January and somehow I manage to get my writing cap on and type out a few hundred words to post on the blog, which I am not even sure anyone reads anymore. But what is writing, if not shouting into the void in the hope that someone somewhere is going to read what you have written and maybe, just maybe, like it.
I don’t remember the exact number, but I have been following Seth Godin’s blog for a few years now. He has a blog that breaks a few rules of blogging – the blog is hosted on typepad and does not have comments enabled – yet his blog’s twitter account has more than 500 thousand followers. I am sure most of us would be happy with one third of that number.
I have often wondered what it is that makes his blog work, and I have come up with a few things that he does that make people fall in love with his blog. I think these can be used by bloggers, and writers alike to improve their craft.
So far on my blog, The YA’s Dogtown, I’ve received two large bursts of traffic from Tumblr and Reddit. Both were 500+ views on the same day.
The first was from a high-profile Tumblr blog, which reblogged the link to one of my older posts. The second was from a Reddit group, for a guest post over at YA Indie.
You would think that I would be giddy from these referrals and have a large increase in followers, but that wasn’t the case in both incidents.
The end result? Two comments, and no new subscribers.
The crowd passed through, but didn’t stay around.
You Got to Convert.
Have you ever come across a blog post and liked it? Have you then wished that you could write a post like that? If your answer to these questions is yes, then you must have also wondered what it is that makes a great blog post.
Here, I have listed five things that a post must have to make it a great blog post.
Every writer has to figure out what works best – and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits. – Nora Roberts
Every time I find it difficult to write something, I set out on a search on the Internet to find something that may get me inspired enough to type out a few words on my computer. Sometimes doing this works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I am a strong believer in systems. If you have to do anything repetitively, it is best to devise a system for it. Doing that takes away some of the pain and labour associated with doing that thing. Since, writing a blog post is something that bloggers have do repetitively, it is best that bloggers devise a system for it.
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