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Post by The Voice on Apr 22, 2016 13:26:43 GMT -6
In the past decade or two, amateur writers have found a wonderful tool that allows them to write and essentially publish their work for the entire world to see, for free. Weblogs, or Blogs as they have come to be known, have proliferated across the internet. And like most everything on the net, there are pros and cons to this. One positive aspect is that it has allowed a number of talented people to expose their work to large audiences and some have been able to parlay this into steady income. From the readers perspective, the blog explosion added a lot of interesting content that is available to read for free. On the downside, because blogging is so popular, it seems like millions of people are doing it (and they are). This means competition for readers is fierce and if one is blogging with the intention of generating traffic for financial gain (either through clickable ads or developing popularity as a freelance writer) one must not only learn to write well, but learn the fine art of internet marketing. The large number of blogs also means that a lot of really awful writing is out there and readers may have to wade through lots of dreck before finding anything really worth consuming. So to all the bloggers out there, what has your experience been like? What brought you to starting your blog? What topics do you cover? Do you write fiction, non-fiction or both? What marketing (if any) do you do and what is your goal with your blog? Lastly, what advice would you give someone who has never blogged but is considering starting one? What platform do you use? (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, LiveJournal, etc) Thanks. ~V
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Post by Joy Pixley on May 2, 2016 8:30:15 GMT -6
I started my blog last June with the main goal of sharing my short stories. At that time I wasn't even thinking about trying to get published. I just wanted to "do something" with my writing. And posting it on a blog for others to see seemed a reasonable answer to that.
Since then, I've read a lot of posts about how one is supposed to blog and get followers and build an audience and an author brand, etc. etc. Most of which only convinces me that I'm doing something wrong, because my blog does not have the thousands of followers that these people say I can get in "just three easy steps!"
But I enjoy it anyway. The blog allows me to connect with other writers, and to post shorts and get positive feedback on them. It can take a lot of time, if I'm not careful, especially with replying to everyone else's blog posts and commenting on them. So I'm trying to find a good balance. But I certainly feel much more like an active writer now than I did when it was just me, writing alone and taking my stories to my little in-person critique group.
I've found WordPress to be very easy to use, but I can't speak to the other platforms.
The main piece of advice I'd offer before starting / while starting your blog is to think very hard about what you're trying to accomplish, and what you want to say. This is extremely helpful when designing your blog and figuring out what to post. Also, I really enjoyed the free Blogging 101 course at WordPress, so I'd recommend that.
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Post by Felicia Hf on May 11, 2016 15:49:52 GMT -6
I started my blog about a year or two ago, though back then I had neither the time nor the ideas to keep it going much. I simply wanted to share my poems and flash fiction, like Joy says, "to do something with my writing". I read somewhere that every author must have a blog, so I decided that now was the time to get one going.
At the beginning, I didn't much care about marketing, so I did nothing with my blog, and simply let WordPress users find it on their own. It sort of worked to begin with, though only very slowly, but now I have built an audience, especially through taking part in some of the blogging flash fiction challenges that are out there (such as Sunday Photo Fiction, FFftPP, FFfAW and Friday Fictioneers).
I still don't really do any marketing, since I blog not simply to build myself an audience, but also to keep myself writing each day and be forced to post something new. I blogged mostly poetry for quite a while, but a couple of months ago that has changed to posting flash fiction, which I think attracts more readers, but also I prefer writing it now, much more than I used to.
I use WordPress and I find it very easy to use. I had absolutely no idea about how blogs worked before signing up for the platform, but that changed rather quickly. I think the biggest advice I have, is to get involved in the blogging community by finding other blogs that are similar to your own and commenting on other people's work. At the very beginning, I thought blogging was a very solitary thing - that everyone just posts on their own blog and then leaves until they post again. I was very wrong about that! The blogging community is a wonderful thing to be part of and if you want other people to read your work, then be sure to read the work of others too!
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Post by Joy Pixley on May 13, 2016 6:54:26 GMT -6
I'm not even sure what "marketing" I could do. I've been doing the same thing you (Felicia) talk about -- participating in flash fiction contents, commenting on others' blogs -- but the follower base seems to grow *very* slowly, and most of the followers don't ever seem to comment or even like my posts. Still, I'm happy that at least I have a small group of new blogging friends who do stop by to read and comment.
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Post by Felicia Hf on May 13, 2016 8:32:37 GMT -6
I'm not even sure what "marketing" I could do. I've been doing the same thing you (Felicia) talk about -- participating in flash fiction contents, commenting on others' blogs -- but the follower base seems to grow *very* slowly, and most of the followers don't ever seem to comment or even like my posts. Still, I'm happy that at least I have a small group of new blogging friends who do stop by to read and comment. You're right - there's people who follow, but never comment or like. I feel like my follower base grows sometimes at a verrrry slow rate, and sometimes there's multiple new followers within a day. I'm not entirely sure how that happens. I think the only marketing that one can do, is to interact with others and keep blogging.
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Post by Joy Pixley on May 13, 2016 8:47:28 GMT -6
It feels so random sometimes. I'll try getting involved in contests, or posting on blogs with larger audiences, and I'll get one or two new followers and think, hey, that worked. Then I'll practically stop posting at all during Camp NaNo and *still* get random people following me, people who have never even liked a single post. Where are they coming from? Why are they following me? And at the same time, some of the people who stop by and comment almost every time I do flash fiction with them still don't follow my blog. Argh, so confusing!
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Post by The Voice on May 13, 2016 8:56:04 GMT -6
It feels so random sometimes. I'll try getting involved in contests, or posting on blogs with larger audiences, and I'll get one or two new followers and think, hey, that worked. Then I'll practically stop posting at all during Camp NaNo and *still* get random people following me, people who have never even liked a single post. Where are they coming from? Why are they following me? And at the same time, some of the people who stop by and comment almost every time I do flash fiction with them still don't follow my blog. Argh, so confusing! That happened with me just this week. Without my computer, I didn't participate in the flash challenges I normally post and my views dropped down very low, and yet I had someone follow me that I've never seen before. *shrugs* I dunno.
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Jade
Junior Member
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
Posts: 63
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Post by Jade on Jun 8, 2016 19:09:34 GMT -6
It feels so random sometimes. I'll try getting involved in contests, or posting on blogs with larger audiences, and I'll get one or two new followers and think, hey, that worked. Then I'll practically stop posting at all during Camp NaNo and *still* get random people following me, people who have never even liked a single post. Where are they coming from? Why are they following me? And at the same time, some of the people who stop by and comment almost every time I do flash fiction with them still don't follow my blog. Argh, so confusing! That happened with me just this week. Without my computer, I didn't participate in the flash challenges I normally post and my views dropped down very low, and yet I had someone follow me that I've never seen before. *shrugs* I dunno. A lot of people who follow are those who follow hoping for a follow back. I see the same thing on my blog (actually, I think we probably all see it on our blogs), and it is a little discouraging when I see people follow me but they don't like or comment. Was it a mistake? Did they accidentally click 'follow' and just haven't realized it? I also see people who like every post but never comment a single thing.
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Post by lena01 on Sept 4, 2017 1:13:32 GMT -6
A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts"). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
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