Monday Musings–How To Blog…

…While Not Re-inventing the Wheel

Part 1 — Right Frame of Mind

Right Worldview — I like to think of the blogging community as a group; a world-wide group. Think of the local writers’ group you attend if you’re a writer. Then imagine that group spanning the globe comprising of every imaginable country and culture. That’s the breadth and beauty of blogging. But remember, each one of your potential followers are people, real people.
Right Mindset — Gathering those real people, followers takes time. Marketing likes to depersonalise the whole experience and calls those visits from readers “traffic”. They are not traffic, they are individuals who have searched for your particular topic of interest and taken the time to read it. When I first began blogging 6 years ago, one of my first international visitors was from the Bahamas. I imagined that person sitting on the beach sipping their mint julep, reading from their jewel-studded iPad, and dreaming of the Central Australian adventure I had written. Just one person but imagining that person made all the difference to me, that they had connected with my story.
Right Attitude — My first like (besides my faithful friends and mother) was a well-known Romanian blogger. He has written many posts on how to blog, so I feel, I don’t need to repeat his good advice in this article. The following is a link to Christian Mihai’s website, The Art of Blogging. My main takeaway from one article I read from there, was that if we don’t have the right attitude to blogging, if we are amateurish in our approach, we may spread our web of information wide, but we won’t touch many in a way that is meaningful or truly influential. And the reality about developing authentic relationships that change and grow us and others, is that they take time.
Right Timing — I think there’s enough on the internet about how to set up a blog and post, so, I won’t go into detail about that. Check out Wiki how for setting up a blog, or website. But what you need to do is be regular. Followers, once you get them, are creatures of habit and if you post once a week on a Tuesday, for instance, they will look for your post, once a week on a Tuesday. One of the frustrating things I found when I first entered the blogging community, was finding those bloggers who I liked. Some would seem to vanish into the vortex of the world wide web, never to be seen again. It took me a while to figure out that if I “followed” these bloggers, they would turn up in my “Reader Feed”. Other bloggers have mentioned that this is the reason they “like” posts. They then look at their “likes” to find their favourite bloggers again. Regular posting, I found, helped raise my profile in the plethora of websites and posts and make those blessed algorithms work for me. I knew that my blogs were rising like cream when I observed a reader emerging out of “Search Engine” in the stats of my post. When starting up my blog, though, I invited as many friends and family to follow my blog through email, and Facebook.
Right, Don’t Give Up — It’s three months into you’re blogging venture, and nothing; not a hump, nor a bump raising those statistics. ‘I don’t know,’ my mother said, ‘no one has visited my posts in ages. I think I’ll give up.’ And yeah, it seemed as though the WWW “gods” were doing everything in their power to squash my mother’s enthusiasm to continue. As they tried to do some years before with my blog. As they have done with a number of writer friends of mine who have set up blog sites or websites and then with a failure to thrive, they have silently let them slide into obscurity. Again, it takes time for your website or blog site to gain traction. Just be patient.

[to be continued…]

© Lee-Anne Marie Kling 2021

Feature photo: Somerton Beach Dreaming © L.M. Kling 2010

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