Advice for New Bloggers

So, you’ve decided you want to have a blog, eh? No? Ok, you can scroll to the “in closing” bits.

Yes? Ok then.

The first thing you will want to do — I mean it, before you even go choosing a name — is to figure out what you want to write about. Do you want to have an online diary? To write about a particular industry? To put up funny pictures of your pets? To document family stories? To give us your two-cents-worth about world events? To tell us what is going on in your hometown? What kind of tone do you want to set: funny, serious, sarcastic, psychotic, scholarly? You don’t have to limit yourself — and you will soon see why — but you need to have an idea what you are up to.

Next, you’ll want to decide where to keep your online “stuff.” There are plenty of places you can blog for free, and until you really get a following that is what you will want to do. Blogger and WordPress are fine places to start. They will host your content (put it on their servers and blast it out to anybody who requests it). They will also have “templates” on which you can put your stuff to keep it organized.

Now, what do you want to call yourself? You can use your name, and that’s perfectly alright. You can use a descriptive term — such as ShortWoman or Maya’s Granny. You can use a way of thinking of yourself — such as Defective Yeti or NYC Educator. You can use a place, real or fictional — PureLand Mountain or Welcome to Pottersville. You can base it on what you plan to talk about — MemeCats or The Market Oracle. All those are taken, and I think you’ll find them all in my Blogroll. If you buy your URL, www.whateveritis.com for example, you can forward it to one of the free hosting services I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Be aware that other people will be reading what you have written, and that will have consequences. Sometimes it’s good consequences, such as my being asked to write for Central Sanity. Sometimes it’s bad consequences, like losing your job after saying unflattering things about your boss. Not putting your name on the top of the page does not mean it is impossible to figure out who you are. Just like with e-mail, my advice is to not say anything you wouldn’t read out loud to your mother, your boss, or a judge. This will keep you out of a lot of trouble. Oh, Hi Mom!

The next thing is to make peace with change. Unless you are already a professional writer, odds are really good that your blogging “voice” will evolve. You can check this phenomenon yourself by looking through my archives. Four years is a really long time online. Just because you want to only write funny stories about dogs today doesn’t mean you won’t get really inspired by something completely unrelated tomorrow.

Speaking of inspiration, if you get stuck, feel free to go poke around a big news site, or one of those community sites where they talk about 83 different things on any given day, or a place that tracks current hot stories other people are blogging about? Surely you will find something that strikes you. Failing that, you may find someone else whose writing you like enough to say “Hey! Check this guy out!” This is where it’s handy to write about a fairly broad set of topics.

My final bit of advice is to pace yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in a flurry of new stuff and then burn out. Please don’t do that. Not everybody is as prolific as the big A-List bloggers. Not everybody has the stamina to post every day. And if you look at those A-List blogs, you will find that almost every single one is a group effort. Why don’t you start by planning to post every week, and if you feel motivated in between consider that a bonus?

In closing: Hello Kami; thanks to Preemptive Karma, Why am I being punished? Osama did it!; Human evolution may be speeding up; speaking of evolution, Ron Paul will be speaking at this week’s anti-aging medical conference in Vegas (you’ll have to scroll way down); standardizing international adoption policies; climate science as manipulated by the White House; and D-Ed Reckoning brings us not just one, but two “why oh why can’t we have competent reporting” stories.