Ten Things I’ve Learned about Blogging

Last Tuesday marked the five-year anniversary of when I started blogging. February 1, 2000, I headed out into relatively uncharted territory. (Read my first post here.) In the past few years and especially in 2004, millions of people have started blogs. What have I learned in my first five years of blogging?

1. Blogs are not for everyone. I’ve met a lot of people who tried it but gave it up quickly. If writing is a chore for you, then you might think of another avenue for personal expression.
2. Links are your friends. Some blogs, like dooce.com, present a narrative and rarely link. But for those of us who are more interested in news and online happenings, linking to other things helps bring people back for more.
3. Register a domain. It’s a lot easier for people to find you if you have your own domain name rather than anonymousblog.blogspot.com. Over the years I’ve gone between fishthing.net, danielstout.com, and manufacturedenvironments.com among others.
4. I like to blog. Over the past 5 years, there have been ups and downs on the blog. The main thing is to keep on plugging away at it. Whatever is happening at the moment—both good and bad—will pass. Blogging is akin to writing—the more you do it, the better it goes.
5. Write for your audience. If you don’t have your audience clearly in mind when you write, then you’ll miss the mark. This is true of all types of journalistic writing.
6. The blog is not a journal. I write daily in a journal and write occasionally on my blog. The two shall not meet. The stuff I put in my journal would rarely be at home in public on the internet. People who mistake the two tend to get fired.
7. To win, you’ve got to play the game. This might also be expressed as, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” There are certain conventions to the game. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, begin first by reading blogs and see how other people do it. Learn what the rules are, and then go off and do your thing.
8. Be responsive. When people send you comments or emails in response to your blog, in the long run it’s best to respond back. Something about what you wrote caught somebody’s attention, and it’s good to reward their interest in some way. Although, there is a small class of people who bite the hand that feeds them (read: trolls), which leads us into…
9. Don’t let the fools get you down. Sometimes I’ve gotten responses to my blog filled with curses and invective. That seems to just come with the territory. Whatever opinion you may express, there’s someone out there who for whatever reason disagrees and feels the need to tell you about it. Best to just hit delete and forget about it.
10. Productivity is rewarded. Your blog may be a hit, but if you stop posting people will stop coming. Some people find the time to post several times a day. You needn’t post anywhere near that much, but you do need to post semiregularly if you want people to come back. Blogging can be about rhythm. People get used to visiting your blog, and traffic may take a hit if you interrupt your usual rhythms.

Well, those are 10 things I’ve learned in no particular order. Do you blog? What have you learned about blogging?