Day 14: Blogging

There are a ton of fabulous blogs out there. A lot of them are stunning and funny and unique. A lot of them are boring and horrible to look at. None of that has anything to do with you. If you want to blog, you should. If you don’t, don’t! If you enjoy your subject, and are completely impassioned by your subject matter and whether you have lots of so-called competition or not does matter at all.
I say “so-called” because I think that in this situation, there is no competition. If you have a lot of great content – and content is what rocks a site and gets it to the top of the SEO – your blog will float to the top like a balloon full of good content helium. Fill it full of rocks, and it’ll sink to the bottom. It’s simple, really.
Do not get discouraged if you’re not getting a lot of comments. I didn’t when I was on Blogger but people were always telling me at conferences that they read my blog. I wasn’t listed with any stat sites, so I had no idea if even one person was reading me. But I loved the exercise of writing the blog, and sometimes, when I was stuck on a book, doing a blog entry unstuck me!
The passion you bring to your subject will be part of the reason the blog will find followers. You can bring that passion to other people’s blogs too, as a guest blogger, and gain followers and raise your profile that way as well. And you can ask other people to guest blog yours. Make sure you make it worthwhile for them, allowing them to include links in their post, and linking them in your blogroll and in your thank you post the next day.
When you have great content, readers will forward your posts, too (don’t forget to make it easy for them, by adding Facebook, Twitter, and email widgets)! My friend Loreen Leedy sent me the link to this wonderful post on social media, written by Beth Revis. I must meet this woman; I love the way she writes.
You know what just happened? Now I’m going to go follow her on Twitter and see what she has to say there. Wait here a sec.
Pause
Okay. I went on Twitter, and followed her. Turns out, @BethRevis has a NY Times bestseller (cool!) and so obviously, she is a good writer (isn’t it great when your gut proves you right?) and I hope I do get to meet her because I’m really liking her blog.
And that’s what passion and good content can do. She has turned me into a fan, now I’ll go find her book, too.
Go find your passion and write your blog! And remember this if you think it’s too hard, thanks to Pat Flynn over at SmartPassiveIncome for the demonstration!