Blogging can be a fantastic motivator to work harder, to build relationships and to grow your career. Many want to have a blog and have been procrastinating about getting started. Or, they got started and set the wrong goals or expectations for themselves and after just a few weeks or months the initial motivation fizzled out and there is some dust accumulated over there. So, here are a few things for you to think about if you are planning on having a blog (yes, do have one), getting started with a blog, or if you had a blog and need to do some CPR to bring it back to life.
Be Yourself
If you try to write with a different persona then yourself, or if you try to be cute when in real life you’re not, or if you try to be controversial but that’s not you, then you are adding a burden to the blogging process by creating extra work. If you are yourself, you don’t have to over-think. This tip not only applies to the content, but also to the voice you’ll use on your blog. Is it ok to have misspellings? To use expressions from the city you grew up that not everybody will get it? Is it ok make jokes? If those things reflect who you are in real life, then yes. Don’t use the same language you use on a business email to a client. That’s not the real you. The real you is the person talking to friends about that topic on a restaurant table. Every time I have a guest blogger I tell him or her: “write as if you were sending an email to a friend”.
Make it personal
People will not read your blog because they want to know the latest news from your industry. They’ll read it because they want to read about your opinion. Yes, personal opinion. Don’t try to make a neutral-point-of-view writing. This is not a magazine or a newspaper. It’s your blog and your voice/thoughts matter. Because of that, don’t re-post content from others, don’t just copy a news snippet from AP because you find interesting. That’s being part of the echo-chamber and it only decreases the signal-to-noise ratio on your blog.
A schedule that works
The biggest mistake of new bloggers is to set a schedule even before they have a feeling for how long it takes to blog. First of all, don’t set a schedule for yourself, but set goals -- say that you’ll try to write 4-6 blog posts per month instead of saying “every Monday”. What if there is a Monday that you are busy and don’t feel like writing? Then you’ll have a feeling of failure and from there is just downhill to not blog anymore. Give yourself some time to find the sweet spot. Maybe you’ll find you got addicted to it and you’ll blog 5 times per week. Maybe you find that you are really capped at 2-4 posts per month. Either way, don’t set a schedule on the first few months. Be spontaneous.
An idea queue
What if you run out of ideas to blog about? If you are like me, you’ll never do. Every time I’m in a meeting, or grocery shopping, or just wandering the Internet and I have an idea that would make an interesting blog post, I send myself an email with a 1 or 2 sentence description of it. Then I organize all my ideas in a single place (on my case a draft message on Outlook). Every time I find myself w/ 20-30 minutes to spare I check my list of ideas for blog posts and write about it. My current list has 10 items. The list grows when I go to all day events, meet new entrepreneurs or investors or hit a new challenge on the business.
Have a theme
A typical mistake of new bloggers is to write about “everything that I’d find interesting and I’d like to read myself”. On that case you’ll have an audience of one. Yes, you are a marketer, but you also like to cook, build model airplanes and are really into astronomy and salsa dancing. You need to pick the central theme of your blog and stick to it, otherwise you alienate your readers every time you go off topic. It’s very common for Tech Startups bloggers to veer too much into the technology aspects and forget the startup side of things. If you start writing about a new script testing tool you are not writing about tech startups, you writing a technology blog an that’s a whole different beast.
Title matters
Most of your readers will only read the title of your blog post -- the same way people scan newspaper until they find something that attracts them. Avoid titles without context (“Another win”, “We are back”, “Tough week”, etc.). Think about what would your reader get if she read only the title. These are a few good titles “Tips on how to market your startup in a recession”, “How will Obama affect startups”, “Acme releases new tool to count coyotes with a twist”.
Content style
Having pictures on your blog post dramatically increases the number of people that read your post. Seriously. I can’t explain why, but it’s well known by many bloggers. If you have a picture or image at hand, go ahead and add it to the post. But don’t make it a burden (like trying to find a LOLcat image for each post you do). Also, do bold important pieces of text to make it easier for the people who read by scanning (same reason you should use numerals instead of spelled out numbers), but don’t emphasize every other sentence.
Size matters
Contrary to when you are writing an article, a blog post can be as short as one paragraph and as long as you want it to be, but the sweet spot is between 1 and 4 paragraphs. And by sweet spot I mean post length that maximizing the number of people that will read it fully. The only two exceptions I can think of to write longer posts is if you are doing a Q&A type of post or if you are doing a list (“12 reasons to …”). The reason these are ok is because they are easy to scan and for the reader to get the gist of it (like this blog post you are reading right now).
Have fun
Don’t panic if you don’t get hundreds of readers on your first week. Be very happy if you get five readers. You should be doing this for the long run, so like anything that takes time, it’s much more palatable if you are having fun along the way.
Here are a few things for you to read next to get your blog going: