Starting a Blog

Dear Steff Metal

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now. It’s very different to the other blogs I read - totally inspiring!

I’m a visual artist, and I’m thinking of starting a blog to help promote my work (I have an Etsy store but no website as yet). But I don’t want to start, make some kind of horrid mistake, and have to do everything again.

So, can you give some advice to a novice – how do I start a blog? What should I do to make a blog a success?

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I recieve this question and variations thereof all the time. People seem to believe I’m an authority on the matter. They’re wrong. While I’ve created two reasonably successful personal blogs, and written for several business blogs, I don’t know everything there is to know about blogging. I haven’t tried everything. Not by a long shot.

However, I’ve probably had more experience than the people sending me these emails, and I did just finish writing my Grymm & Epic Guide to Blogging. So I can offer a few words of encouragement.

Elvira's Gramaphone, print by artist Blonde Blythe, $5

Blogging is not a one-size-fits-all game. What works for one person will be a disaster for the next. Whenever all the experts say “DON’T DO THIS! IT’S BLOGGING SUICCIDE!”, someone does it and becomes a millionaire. So I can’t tell you how you should start a blog and make it a success. I can tell you how I start a blog, and you can take from that what you will.

The first thing you need to do is assess why you want to start a blog, and what your blog should be about. I go over this in great detail in my blogging ebook, but I’ll summarize a little for you here:

Why do you want to blog:

• You love writing and want to write and publish in an immediate format
• You want to document your crazy life
• You’re interested in start an online business
• You’ve got a funny idea for a blog
• You want to promote your book, music, artwork, game, etc.
• You want to be an internet personality

Your reasons for blogging are very important, as they permeate every facet of your blog. You know you want to promote your artwork, but is that all you want to do with your blog? Why do you want a blog, specifically, rather than, say, spending money on advertising or making a static website?

What is your blog going to be about? You should choose an overarching concept and a niche topic or niche demographic. It’s not enough to say “my blog is about my life and everyone in it.” I wouldn’t read that unless you were hilariously funny, because I don’t know you, so it doesn’t have any relevance to me.

Who are you writing for? Your friends and family? The artistic community? Customers and clients of your artwork? twenty-somethings? fifty-somethings? Metal-lovers? Cupcake-lovers? The nature of your blog changes depending on the audience you choose.

Many artists / business people make the mistake of blogging about what they know – running a business. Unless you plan to run a business telling people how to run a business, writing a blog with advice for emerging artists probably won’t help you sell paintings. Writing a blog with interesting article about gothic artwork – it’s history, personalities and techniques – will attract people interested in gothic artwork, and will probably help you sell your own art. See how it works?

Once you’ve figured out your angle, you need to choose a blogging platform. For people with zero experience producing content online and no desire to learn more about creating websites online, I recommend blogger. It’s free and extremely easy to use. Alternativly, wordpress.com (also free) and livejournal (although I only recommend livejournal for very personal blogs – business blogs don’t work so well there.)

Beware though, that all of these free blog platforms place limitations on the functionality of your blog. Also, they’re all hosted on a subdomain (suchandsuch.blogspot.com instead of suchandsuch.com). You don’t have total control over what your blog looks like and the content you publish on it. I don’t like this – I prefer being creative and in-control.

I always choose my own domain, which I buy through my hosting company. I use self-hosted WordPress to run my site and manage my content. I LOVE it and always recommend it.

Now you’ve got your blog all set up, you get to start the fun part – writing! Yaaay! Happy dance! Keep a long list of topics you’d like to blog about near your computer. That way, when you sit down to blog, but you don’t know what to write about, just look over your list to find ideas.

Create a blogging schedule, and stick to it – whether you blog once a week or five times a day (I recommend 3-5 days a week to build blog traffic). I’ve found consistant blogging to be the way to bring in traffic.

When writing your blog, don’t forget to add other types of media – pictures, videos, music, interactive games and polls, quizzes … the possibilities are endless. Don’t limit yourself to only words on a page – especially if your medium is visual – or your readers will get bored.

To promote your blog, find other blogs who cater to the same audience as yours, and comment on their posts. If you make enugh intelligent comments, people will click through to look at your blog. I earn a lot of traffic by writing guest posts on other, more popular blogs. You could also try promoting yourself on Twitter – it’s working wonders for practically every blogger I know.

I’ve only scratched the surface here, but I must quit now, or I’ll write out all 45 000 words of my ebook, and then no one will buy it and I won’t be able to afford to go to Wacken next year. And that will make me a sad metalhead :(

You can find more information (250 pages of more information) about writing a blog and building a following in my ebook Grymm & Epic Guide to Blogging, which is on sale THIS WEEK ONLY for $15 bucks.

So, readers, I ask you now, why do you blog? How and why do you choose the topics you write about? What mistakes have you made, and what advice could you give to this novice blogger?

Super Snuggles and Shoggoth Kisses \m/
Steff