Blog #12

Here tis, my final blog. Wow, I thought I was going to run out of things to say by week five. I have successfully gripped, wrote enthusiastically, whined, and probably some other things, all to get to blog #12. Anyway, as I promised last week, I was going to provide you with successful bloggers ideas to make one supposedly a successful blogger. So as not to keep you waiting, I will leave anymore fluff out and get started. This blog was adapted from the article titled So You Want to Be a Blogging Star? From The New York Times Business Day, Section C8 on March 20, 2008.
According to Mr. Cuban, don’t go into blogging to make a living. He believes whether a person blogs to earn a little money, to influence opinion or for sheer ego gratification, amassing a large audience is the goal.
The following information was provided by successful bloggers with successful non-blogging careers.
1. Don’t expect to get rich. If you blog, you can place automatically served ad banners from Google or AdBrite onto your blog. You will receive a check only if the account builds to a set amount. Philip Kaplan, president of AdBrite, cautions that only one in six blogs draws 500 page views a day. That adds up to almost $45.00 a month.
2. Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice. Mr. Cuban indicated, “Blog about your passions. Don’t blog about what you think your audience wants. Post because you have something you are dying to write about.”
3. Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. Glen Reynolds advises “deal with the rest of your life first.” “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.”
4. Just post it already! Xeni Jardin indicates: “Don’t bottle up your ideas forever believing you have to hit the same kind of mature, complete, perfect point as you would with a magazine or newspaper article. Blogs are always in progress.”
4. Keep a regular rhythm. Bloggers apparently disagree on how often one should post. What has been agreed upon is, that you establish a reliable rhythm for your readers, so they know they can rely on you to have new material posted. Also, there is no specific length for a post. Consistency seems to be the answer to any disagreements throughout this section.
5. Join the community, such as it is. Linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. This increases your readership twofold. First, it sends readers directly from other sites, and second, it raises your ranking in search engine results. However, do not use other bloggers’ photos or excerpt their writing without a link back to the original. When in doubt, give credit.
6. Plug yourself. This is what the name-brand bloggers do. A more direct way to draw a crowd is to submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites such as, Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. It will help if your blog post includes a home video of something totally off-the-wall. Those are the types that get passed around in an instant.
In conclusion, the largest threat is not that you will fail to learn to blog. It is that if you blog regularly for long enough, and begin to get comments and links from other bloggers, you will have trouble doing your day job.
So, there you have it, six easy steps to becoming a well rounded and renowned blogger. Although, I have had a more enjoyable time blogging than I had originally thought, I must say that this will be my final blog post. I know I have many more important things in life to do (my day job) than to sit here watching my blog for comments to come rolling in. So, farewell to all of you in Indy and VIC land. It has been enjoyable. Maybe we will all meet again someday in another form of technology.
Technologically speaking, signing off……………………………………. Sianara