Friday, June 11, 2010

The Art of Blogging

Turns out Will Richardson has been blogging for 9 years. Will and David Warlick were the first education bloggers I ever read, before I even realized what blogging really was. Turns out I created my Blogger account back in November of 2004. I certainly haven't been as prolific, nor have I written as much as those two gentleman, but I have to say that I have enjoyed blogging. As I'm waxing philosophically about this, how apropos that Lee Kolbert is requesting some advice for new bloggers. So here is some of my advice:

  • Set aside time to blog and respond to other blog posts. Think of it as your reading e-mail time.
  • Go ahead and write your posts and save them as drafts. Get your ideas out and then refine
  • Please do not write meandering live blog posts that make no sense to anyone (except you). I find that if I take live blogging notes in Evernote or Word and then refine that into a blog post I get better results.
  • Post and post often. Just because no one comments doesn't mean no one is reading. Which reminds me, use a tool like Google Analytics or Sitemeter to display who comes to your blog. It is a great feeling to see "hits"
I have enjoyed my blogging experience. I didn't get any book deals, or movie rights, but I've loved it just the same :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good points above both liveblogging and posting. It's also good to keep in mind that even if you are using tools to measure/count visitors, they are not always accurate, and even the best of them fail to catch all visitors! I've had firsthand experience with this: I experimented with 4 hitcounters and found wide variations in the number of "daily hits" and "pageviews" - with a gap as wide as 150 visitors!

I'd also like to invite you and your readers to check out my "15 Commandments of Blogging" - Peaceful Blessings!

Bethany Smith said...

Yes it is interesting to see what determines metrics. I find that scripts - like Google Analytics vary drastically from my server side hits. But that the trends are mostly the same, so I focus on that more than hits per say :)