Cheat your way into blogging every day

Only a crazy person would blog every day, right?

In that case, welcome to the madness.

We crazies will be blogging every day during the month of May in the 3rd annual WordCount Blogathon. It’s our annual exercise to get pumped up about blogging. It’s not too late to join us; you can register here. (A few people have had trouble with the registration form – if that happens to you, leave a comment here and I’ll get the sign up information to you manually.)

Blogging every day is a commitment, but it doesn’t have to be a grind. The key is how you approach it.

This year, I’m all about making it as easy as possible.

In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say if you’re doing the Blogathon, you need to cheat.

Cheat as in take short cuts.

Here’s how you can cheat your way into blogging every day:

Beg – For last year’s Blogathon, we started an official Guest Post Exchange day, where writers asked someone else to swap guest posts – or they exchanged posts with a writer friend who wasn’t in the Blogathon. We’re doing the same thing this year on Tuesday, May 18. But why stop at one? If you really think you’re going to have a hard time posting every day, get someone else to share the burden. Susan Johnston at The Urban Muse Writer uses guest bloggers to cover days she’s away on business or vacation; in fact, she’s even got a link to guidelines for guest bloggers on her front page. We’re pretty flexible on the rules here at WordCount Blogathon headquarters – if you can cover more than one day in May with guest bloggers, more power to you.

Borrow – If you run your own blog but also blog for pay elsewhere, why load yourself up with extra work? On the days when posts from your paid blogging job are running, put up a short post on your own blog pointing to it. If you wrote it and it’s running somewhere, that should count, right? Now that I’ve got a twice-a-week blogging gig at SecondAct.com, that’s what I’m planning to do.

See an interesting post on someone else’s blog? Borrow it to do a post on your own. I don’t mean copy and paste that person’s post onto your blog – that’s not ethical and as someone who makes my living writing, I’d never suggest stealing someone else’s work. But there’s nothing wrong with being inspired by someone else’s idea and then putting your own spin on it. It’s accepted blogging practice to write about your reaction to someone else’s post. You could include a sentence or paragraph from the post you’re writing about in your own – but always with the proper attribution and a link.

Steal – Look through your old blog posts and steal your own ideas. Is there a post you could follow up on because of something that’s happened since then? Is there something you wish you’d written better? Redo it. Are there posts you could group together because they’re all related to the same topic? Write a theme or “best of” post based on them. Look at the next paragraph and you’ll see this post is actually a theme post, because I’ve listed other posts I’ve written on blogging. Tune in later this week and you’ll see another post from me on how “best of” posts can save your sanity.

Here are some other posts I’ve written about blogging: