Things I’ve learned about blogging

I realized today that I’ve been blogging on “Unfinished Business” for five years.

FIVE YEARS!

I started with a blogger account in October 2005 that I posted on semi-frequently. Later I switched over to WordPress (a decision I’ve never regretted) and began posting daily Monday through Friday. Last year, I started trying to create “areas” of my blog that focused on various things I was interested in, like my dog, books, and cooking. I haven’t been as good as updating those areas as I’d like, but it’s been a good change.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in my five years as a part-time blogger:

1. Frequency is sometimes more important than content. If you want people to keep coming back to your blog, you have to ensure that there’s something new there for them to read or look at. That doesn’t necessarily mean you write a treatise or a systematic discussion of your faith every day, but it does mean that you post semi-regularly. You don’t always have to post thought-provoking posts or long diatribes full of complicated metaphors; you just have to post something. And in my experience, it’s been the light, silly things I’ve posted about my daily life or weird things I’ve found on the Internet that have garnered the most hits.

2. You have to have a voice. As a writer-type, this is big for me. If you expect people to come to your site, you have to have a point of view. You can’t just detail the events of your life or catalog the cool sites you’ve found on the Internet without any comment. Blogs are personal and tied to a personality. Let yours shine through in what you write. My voice is that of a single girl from the country who lives in the city now who laughs at the silly things that happen to her and loves her God. That shows through in what I write on this blog.

3. Pictures are important. This is an area in which I have failed miserably. Pictures really capture peoples’ attention and help tell the story you’re trying to tell. They also help your posts to get noticed and reposted by the powers that be at your hosting site (WordPress for me) and by other readers. I don’t post a lot of photos because I don’t generally have the funds to buy photos to illustrate my posts and therefore either have to take them myself or go without. I feel strongly that stealing photos off the Internet is wrong and don’t want to violate any copyright law or not give the photographer credit where credit is due.

4. Don’t babble. Stream of consciousness is cool. Longer posts every once in awhile are great. But LOOOOONG posts every day? BAD! I generally try to keep my posts within the range of 300-500 and sometimes go over that. But people come to blogs to read something they can get into and get out of quickly. If they wanted to read a 1000-word article, they’d pick up a magazine or go to the magazine’s website.

5. Pay attention to the basics. If you want your blog to be read consistently or dream of a day when you have a readership the size of the Pioneer Woman‘s or Jon Acuff’s on Stuff Christians Like, you better learn something about grammar and spelling. Don’t confuse words like loose and lose or affect and effect, common Internet errors. Use spellcheck on your blogging site. When in doubt about a comma, don’t. If you want to do more newsy or professional kinds of posts, you might want to look into finding and using a stylebook that fits your purpose. If using all lowercase or run-on sentences is your style, that’s fine. Just be consistent with it!