by The Idea Girl

Created on: January 03, 2010

I never heard the term "blog" before. I was familiar with making websites, but what on earth was a blog?  Sure I had seen books about it at the library but it never really caught my interest.  Until one day, after reading Chris Baty's book No Plot! No Problem! he spoke about creating a "blog."  A blog is like a daily diary or journal of what you do as a writer.  A blog is something of a hobby where you write, post pictures, videos and jokes about something you love to do.  It's a hobby, an interest, something that can quickly become addictive.  

Websites are cool, and Squidoo is great with its ready made templates.  Blogs are another thing.  Yes you have templates but you have to fill them with interesting material to draw a crowd.  One of the greatest tools I've used on my blogs is a thing called Site Meter.  Not only will it tell you what time people are tuning into your "blog" it also keeps track of what KEY words they are searching for. Pay attention to what your readers love.  If you blog about it, they will come in droves!  I found that out after blogging for a month and getting hardly any traffic.  I was frustrated and I didn't want to pay for a search engine optimization or spend hundreds of dollars on marketing gimmicks.  Twitter is great to bring traffic to your blog but it's a four lane highway and lots of people out there are blogging about the same thing.  What you want to do , is blog about something unique and different.  You also want to blog about something you know.  There is nothing worse then reading a blog that has a zillion spelling mistakes on it and the topic of interest is general knowledge.  What you need to do is research your topics on google and find interesting facts, photos, movie clips or music to enhance your writings.  Too many people go on blog catalog (a great place to register your blog and swap URLS with others - generates traffic and gathers readers that like what you do) complaining that they are not getting any comments or traffic to their blogs.  

Half of them are cluttered with advertisements to buy this or that, I click right back out when I see that.  To me a blog should be something written, or typed.  It's like when your in school in English class and the teacher tells you to write an essay about your weekend.  You would rattle off several things that you did and that could be amusing depending on the tone that it was delivered in.  I used to love reading my stories in front of the classroom. I was the class clown after all and I would always make people laugh and sometimes cry because of my wild sense of humor.  With Blogs you can draw a crowd, establish a platform as a budding author (that's what I've been doing on The Idea Girl Says Word Press site) and see what people are interested in reading about.  It takes hard work , if you want it to be a success, but it's worth it.  

Twitter is a great tool for connecting to other writers and so is Facebook.  Look up groups on both that you can join.  You'd be amazed at the wealth of information out there.  And if all else fails and you draw a blank, read a paper, magazine or watch the news, read a few tweets, an idea will come to mind and you can get busy and blog to your hearts content.

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