Thanks to my old friend Grant for his insights into blogging. Grant’s blog is here

While I sit here on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, thinking of my next blog post it suddenly struck me that there is a fine art to documenting your presence online.  Anyone can successfully write an online diary but the whole idea of this blogging craze is for people to actually read what you write and hopefully come back continually as you plod on through life and indeed progress your cyber-presence from a diary to a blog.

What is the difference?  It’s simple really, a diary is just that, a log of your day to day life, maybe thoughts or adventures, either in note form or a more story-based form, maybe intended for a few close friends with the hope or acceptance that someone may stumble across it or simply for yourself to look back on from time to time.  A blog (web log), however, is written with the intention that people will willingly look for it or read it, with the hope that anyone who stumbles upon it, will come back again and again to read what wonderous issues you have to ponder today.  It should be written with the express intent to entice people into wanting to read more, for either good reasons or bad reasons, these of course both being valid reasons non the less and only does it become a valid blog once people actively engage in it.  There is no point having a blog with no visitors.

There are many a different type of blog, either personal blogs where upon a person may vent his or her anger, love or affection for something that matters to them, blogs that promote a specific product or brand, family blogs or hybrid-blogs where a site may use a blogging CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress to run a website not necessarily blog-like but because the tools are so powerful.

Whatever the blog, the reason is the same; to be seen.

Blogging software today is massively powerful in that it combines the ability to run a dynamic website with the ability to create a community and share your views with the world and most importantly it is easy enough for anyone that can use a keyboard to do.  It has opened up endless possibilities for people to share with the world things they wouldn’t normally be able to share, for talent to be seen through a haze of professionalism, for people who are not heared to be heared and for people who are not seen to be seen.

In order to create a successful blog you must meet a minimum of 3 basic criteria:

  1. Design; your blog doesn’t have to be designed by a professional just make sure it is neat, tidy and is easy on the eye.
  2. Content; be original, be honest and be true.
  3. Audience; appeal to an audience, listen to their views and always respect them, when replying re-visit rule 2.

Don’t expect to be blog-famous on day one and don’t expect to make everyone happy all of the time (it’s ~impossible!), don’t try to do something you can’t (such as review products you can’t get your hands on or post reviews of products that are old (no one reads yesterday’s news today)) and don’t leave it too long between posts.  A blog with one post a month won’t get as much attention as one with daily posts.

If you have met the above criteria make sure you enjoy your blogging and always try to be interesting.  I find my problem is that with my blog (which is quite clearly a personal blog) I don’t do enough interesting things to warrant posting and therefore have 2 or 3 day gaps between my posts, I also have to make a conscious effort to not get too deep with what I write so I tend to stay away from the close personal posts.  While I also call my blog a “blog” and not a diary, I am aware that I don’t have a regular audience and therefore don’t fall into the self-defined “blog” category, yet.

If you want your own blog allow me to suggest WordPress.com as it is immensely powerful and simple to use, if you have your own domain and hosting and have enough skill to use FTP and create a MySQL database and wish to host your own wordpress blog (it allows greater flexibility and the installation of plugins) then head over to WordPress.org instead, it only takes 5 minutes to install (honestly!).  I am available to help with minor WordPress related issues (I don’t want to spend hours fixing your installs but will help where I can) and while I can create WordPress themes, I won’t create one for you, sorry.

I’m sure some of you may disagree with parts, or all of this post, but hey, each to their own :)

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