“just think of blogging as emailing in public. Start with short posts about anything. Like most of mine today. If you make a big deal of it, it won’t work. It should be the opposite of labor-intensive.” This is the foundation of my blogging here.
Just before I launched this blog, I emailed Doc, arguably the first blogger, to ask him if he had any advice on blogs and blogging and he offered me that above advice which is priceless and really the difference between burning out and alienating your readership who really want to know you as much as what you have to say — to built a relationship — and having a bouncing baby blog full or personality, color, humor, as well as more serious topics of the day.
Mix it up. It is essential. People don’t want to read an entire essay, especially if you only intend to post once-a-week. Folks want to drop by and see the day-to-day. They want to read you.
In the invaluable communications training that my company sent me to, we learned that in public speaking, people respond less to what you say than to the way you say it. The same thing is true with blogging. For sure.
Once-a-week, I try to write a larger, more in-depth, piece. On marketing, brand protection, brand promotion, online marketing, public relations, search engine optimization, publicity, memetics, culture, propoganda, advertising, social networks, online social networks, virtual communities, technology, web development, emergence, emergent technologies, the future, politics, current events, viral marketing, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing, and the like: case studies and whatnot.
Every day, on the other hand, I live by the words, “start with short posts about anything . . . if you make a big deal of it, it won’t work.”
Thanks for the amazing advice, Doc.
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Welcome. And thanks for the flattery.
For what it’s worth, I am FAR from the first blogger. Dave Winer, who pretty much invented the form as we know it today, got me to start blogging long after he started. And there were many, many others. Still, it’s been since November, 1999. Long time.
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