I started a blog; now what?

I started a blog; now what?

By Rajesh Setty on Tue 04 Oct 2005, 11:31 PM – 2 Comments

This is one of my favorite questions. A few months ago, the question

used to be “How do I start a blog?” That’s no longer the popular

question. Almost everyone knows how to start a blog. In fact, one of

the easiest things about the blog is starting one. With so many free

blogging services available, it should be a snap to setup one. Of course, if it’s easy for you to start a blog, it’s easy for several million people out there.

So, for obvious reasons, starting a blog is no longer a differentiator.

You got to do something more. So, what are those additional things that

you can do?

Over the last few months I have a learnt a thing or two about blogging

from several of my friends who are my role models in the blogging world.

Here’s my $.02 for those of you who are starting to blog (partial list)

1. Focus on providing high ROII (Return on Investment for an Interaction)

Every time a reader visits your blog,

remember that you are taking his or her precious time and the only way

you can get a reader to return to your blog is if you can ensure that

the reader gets the highest return on their investment of interaction

time with your blog.

2. Write something worth linking to

Unlinke newspapers, blogosphere is full

of conversations. Of course, you will link to something that you find

interesting. It’s the same with others – they will link to you only if

you write something that may be useful to their readers. There are no

favors here.. sometimes may be :)

3. Participate in other conversations (Thanks to Dave Taylor for the suggestion)

To make the most out of your blog, you need to participate in conversations outside of your blog too

4. Update your blog frequently

Frequency is subjective and all I can

say is work hard to maintain a reasonable frequency. It takes a lot of

commitment to write quality content at regular frequency.

5. Provide reasons for why you are the right person to say what you are saying

With the amount of information

available on the internet, you can write brilliantly about almost

anything.However what you write will gain more credibility if you are

qualified to say what you are saying. For example, if you are writing

about entrepreneurship, it helps if you are one. This means that

Last but not the least:

6. Blog is not your brand

There is a confusion that you can build

a brand through your blog. While in some remote cases it is a

possibility, in most cases, you have to work online and offline to

build a powerful brand and use your blog to extend it. “Who you are”

matters a lot. Think about some of your favorite bloggers and you will

see that they are all working on exciting things apart from writing

interesting blog entries. They speak at conferences, write books,

contribute to other magazines, participate in charitable causes etc.

In summary, starting a blog is the easiest thing to do. Maintaining one

is hard. Not because you won’t get enough content to write but because

while maintaining your blog, you need to invest in yourself to keep

growing to continue to enhance credibility for your blog.

Good luck!

 

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2 Comments so far, Add Yours

Venture Creators Network  on May 8th, 2006

How to Blog

Tags:No TagsIt’s visible to the naked eye that many of us aren’t experienced bloggers. So here are two posts from Rajesh Setty on the crucial points of blogging.

A. I started a blog; now what?

1. Focus on providing high ROII (Return on Inve…

Anonymous  on September 20th, 2006

This post is great because it made me think critically about my blog posts. I like what you have to say about writing something worth linking to. A lot of what I write is more about bringing people’s attention to OTHER information that I find important or interesting, so I’m constantly linking them to other places like Time Magazine or some financial website. But, come to think of it, I have plenty of interesting ideas of my OWN that others might (*maybe*) find interesting enough on their own two feet.

And, another important point: blog what you know! So, I don’t think I’ll be blogging entreprenuership anytime soon…unfortunately.

Thanks Rajesh!

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