A month ago I had the crazy notion to blog for 31 days straight. For reasons I still don’t understand, two dozen other freelance writers hitched their wagons to the idea and joined me.
31 posts later, I’m at the finish line and here’s what I discovered:
It’s not that hard to blog every day, you have to “just do it.”
Not all blog posts are created equal. Some can be short. Some can simply point to other interesting stuff you’ve found online. Lists are crowd pleasers. Here’s some other great suggestions for types of posts from Problogger, a great source for anything related to blogging.
Regular blogging leads to more readers. Since the blogathon started, traffic to WordCount jumped close to 150 percent. If you blog, they will come. Here’s another great post from Problogger listing 23 ideas for finding new readers for your blog, including persistence.
It’s critical to tag your blogs so they show up when people do keyword searches on Google and other search engines. For a while I did what some search engine optimization experts suggested and only used a few tags per post. But I’m back to putting in about a half dozen or so, and I think it’s working.
Freelancers blog about all kinds of things. Some blog on the same subjects they write about. Jane Boursaw writes about the movies and her Reel Like with Jane Website and blog are full of entertainment industry news. Some, like me, blog about writing. Susan Johnston, The Urban Muse, is in a different place in her career and her take on freelancing is a refreshing change from mine. Other writers’ blogs are very personal, like Claudine Jalajas’ The @$#!% Extension, which chronicles her home addition, or Dawn Weingarten’s blog, where she writes about life after her husband’s organ transplant.
Blogging has been good for my writing. Compared to my other work, my blog posts are pretty chatty. That’s helped the stories I write for a consumer electronics Web site, where adopting a conversational, between-friends tone is a good way to explain tech topics that can sometimes be intimidating for the uninitiated. Here’s one example, this story on encryption I wrote recently for YourSecurityResource.com.
Some fellow blogathoners have been inspired to go after paid blogging gigs. I haven’t got there yet, but I’d consider the right offer.
So thanks to the other freelancers who braved it out. I hope you learned as much from the experience as I did.
Thanks for the blog tips! I’m also a writer (and reader, ok, more of the latter than the former, depending on the regional freelance market) and enjoyed hearing what you discovered about blogs.