BloggingLine - Blogging Tips & Resources

When you start blogging seriously, you probably would consider these few tips. These tips were made based on my experience in building and running my own blog for almost three years.

1. Passion

You need to have passion in writing blogs. You should consider writing blogs not because you want to earn money from it, but because you love writing and want to share your life experience to others. Start from the heart, they say. If you’re a passionate person in blogging, you would not give up easily just because nobody commented on your posts.

2. Focus

What do you love the most in life? Do you like reading, watching movies, or travelling? You should have a blog with topics that are not too broad, but not too narrow either. Okay, so nobody would be angry with you if you want to have a blog with various topic discussions. However, then blog readers would be confused in finding your blog’s identity. Just imagine, if suddenly you find a topic about cooking roasted chicken in this blog. Would you find it weird?

3. Dream

Can you imagine what your blog would be like in the future? Where will you lead the blog next year? You should think yourselves as an entrepreneur. They start by dreaming and creating steps to achieve those dreams. Set as higher dream as possible. If you want to have a blog as famous as TechCrunch or Mashable, then start by creating steps to explore the possibilities to achieve it.

4. Identity

If you have found the topics of what you want to blog, then start checking alternatives for your blog name. Your blog name should suit your topic and preferably, you should have a domain that have the same name as your blog. Your blog and domain name will be your identity. So, be careful when you choose the name. The name would stick with you as long as the blog lives.

5. Frequency

Write as many posts as possible. With each post, put certain keywords that resemble what your blog is all about. The more you write, the more articles would be indexed by search engine. Someday, when a person search something related to the information about your blog topic, he would find your blog among the top list.

6. Design

Blog design is part of your identity. Even though you have great contents, nobody would read your blog if it’s not user friendly designed. You should avoid using free templates for your blog. If there are a lot of blogs out there with the same designed as yours, your blog identity would be blurred. In the future, you should consider designing a custom template only for your blog.

7. Start ’selling’ yourselves

Promote your blog in your daily activities. Make a name card with your blog URL on it. Tell your business partners about what your blog is about and how it would help them gain good information in it. You can also join a mailing list or groups discussions with topic related to your blog. Give some introductions and teaser of your posts in those groups.

The more you write good quality posts, the more your audiences would see you as an expertise. Hopefully, these posts would lead in giving you good project opportunities related to your competences.

Just like what I got when certain clients like what I wrote in my blog.

This post written by Pitra Satvika. He is currently active in his own company, Stratego, as client service manager and creative strategy.

Blog is about opinion. Blog is also about information. And, if we’re talking about blog, we talk about information flow and publishing mechanism. We’re also talking about communication, marketing and business.

I will not talking about how blog can change people’s life. But, I want to propose some reasons for companies which haven’t started blogging. Okey, here are some reasons why you (company) should start blogging:

• You need to publish yourself, right? As a company, you want people know about you — on the Internet. People want to know about what happens to your company. If you have a good news, you want to publish it to the universe. Blog can do this. If we want to publish to other media like newspaper, news portal… they probably do not want to hear your news. Using your own publishing system, you can tell stories your way.
• It’s CHEAP. You do not have to spend millions of dollar only for having online publishing tool. Of course, every company has its own decision on how to spend money, but most of them probably have the same consideration: spend less, get more. We can have a blog set in few minutes.
• It’s easy. Some companies probably wonder: how can a non-geek can publish such stories? How can they have their contents well-organized?
• It has THE technologies. What technologies offered by blog as a publishing system?
  • Search engine optimization. Try to search about your company or products. You will find many blogs in the search results. Do you pay them to publish news about you. Probably. But, what if they published unexpected news?
  • Content management system. You can organize your content in an easy way by categories, date of post, keywords, etc.
  • Social networking. Blog is designed to be a tool for communication. It’s about “delivering contents”.

Those are some reasons to start a blog. If there are companies which think that blog is useless, I am so curious about their reasons.

Thomas Arie Setiawan is currently living in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and run a blog called Orangescale.NET. Together with some friends, he runs a small web design service called Orangescale Studio.

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