Blog Lafayette

So far in this ongoing series of blogging tips, I have looked mainly at the mechanical side of blogs. The platform setup and so forth. But frankly, that stuff is the easy part. The hard part? Writing your blog.

Did I say hard part? Yes, I guess I did, but that really that shouldn’t be the case. It all depends on what you are blogging about. If you have a blog dedicated to “How to clean your carpet”. You may run into a problem finding content. You can only write so many blog articles about how to clean your carpet because there are only so many ways to do it. But, if you have a blog about life in general, you have a much larger subject area to write about! Sometimes people have a hard time coming up with a subject to write about because they are not looking at all of the sources of writing ideas that exist in their day to day life and in the world around them. What did you do today? How did you feel about your day?

I am a member of Virtual Online Learning, a group dedicated to teaching how to do many assorted Internet related things. Among those topics is blogging. In a recent Go To Meeting session, Danna Crawford, the founder of the group gave a great presentation on all of the different sources of content we have available as bloggers. Following is a shortened list of the areas she spoke about.

• Childhood
• Teen Years
• School
• Family
• Towns/City
• Vacations
• Concerts
• Deaths
• Births
• Neighbors
• Events
• Celebrations
• Parties
• Styles
• Weddings
• Divorce
• World and Local News
• Politics
• TV
• Magazines
• Headlines

She also spoke about using a strategy where you finish a statement such as:

• I read …
• I did not agree with …
• I completely agreed with …
• Did you hear about …
• On this date in …

Make these into Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions. We each have the answers to these questions wrapped up in our own lives. When you look at writing a blog from this perspective then you can find much more to say than you may have first imagined. Try one or more of these ideas today. And don’t worry about writing to match James Paterson or some other author that you know of. The goal is to write. The craft of writing well comes with time. Or at least I hope it does. That is what I am counting on for my own writing. How well I write ten years from now will be entirely different than the quality of my writing today.

Have fun blogging and have a great Lafayette Week!

As part of writing this blog I am constantly in search of new and interesting people and things to write about. But even in the course of looking for the new I still revisit the already known favorites. One such is the local Lafayette blog known as Mommyonfire.com. This is a very well put together blog site on the whole. You can tell that the author of the blog, Natalie Snapp, truly cares about what she is writing about. Most of her posts are about her family and her faith. I especially enjoyed her post from today. It is in response to answers she received to a post from the previous week. The question was “What do you love about Jesus.”

I know that there are many different beliefs in our community of Lafayette. I am not preaching to anyone to believe the way I do or the way Natalie does. That is for better men than me to do. What I am saying is that if you want to read a blog that consistently shows what real passion for a subject looks like then you need go no further than Mommyonfire.com. As I find more blogs in the Lafayette area, I hope that all of them will be as well written as her blog. If you know of any other local bloggers, please comment to this article and share the URL of their blogs. Or if you have a blog that you write, then please share it with me. A little shameless self promotion won’t hurt you any! I love the idea of a community of bloggers in the Greater Lafayette area and I would love to have a comprehensive list of all of them to publish in my blog, with all of our differing viewpoints in spotlight!

Sometimes it is easy to get ahead of yourself. Today I am going to take a step back and talk about something that should be decided before installing or setting up your blog.

The first thing you should really think about is, “What is your niche”? What do you care about? In order to write well you need to be passionate about your subject. If you really get into cars and you know a lot about what makes different cars tick, then start a blog about cars. Make it about what you like to talk about when it comes to cars. If you really like what you are writing about, what you have to say will probably be more interesting. Most people like to read blogs that are written by people who are excited about their subject.

Are you funny? Then write humorous stories about things that make you laugh. Be nice of course. People love to read articles from people who know how to make them laugh.

You get the point. The blog you are creating is an extension of YOU. Make is yours. Make it unique. When you start to put your words down for all the world to see, the best you can possibly do is to be yourself. Unless of course you are a split personality with two dozen different characters living within your head. Who knows, maybe you could make it work for you. It would, after all, be your blog and your words.

Have you ever heard the word Blog? Right. Stupid question. Even grandmothers and others that we might think wouldn’t know about blogging have heard the term and may even be blogging as we speak. How many blogs are there? Technorati recently gave the number as 112.8 million and growing.

Why are blogs so popular? We all have ideas. We all have thoughts we think are worth sharing. Blogging is the way to put our thoughts and opinions out there for the public to see. I have to admit that even my own ego has been boosted by seeing my articles in print. But is that all there is to this blogging thing? Is it really just a way to make our egos expand? I certainly hope not.

So if there is more to this blogging phenomenon, then what is it? Why are we spending our time when we could be watching NCIS reruns and eating pizza in our favorite chair? One very big reason for me is this. I like the idea of helping people. I like sharing information that may make someone Else’s life a little easier or more enjoyable. Am I a better person than you because of that? No way! I just have the opportunity that you may not have. I may have time that you don’t have. But we both have ideas worth looking at. Or maybe you just don’t know about how to start a blog and what to do with it after that.

That is why I am writing this small series about Blogging and all the things that make a blog. My goal with this series is to make it easier for you to set up a blog and start putting your ideas out there for all the rest of us to enjoy. And don’t let yourself be fooled by that old nature that says “I can’t do this. I’m not smart enough.” Blogging is simple. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. Your ideas have value. Blogging is a skill and just like most skills, it improves with practice.

Just pull up a chair in front or your monitor and follow along for the next few days. Maybe just maybe what you thought was too hard to try will look possible to you after all!

I have had a very enjoyable day of blogging. If I could blog for a living and do nothing else, I would be content. I simply love the act of writing.

Today, I have been involved in a blogging challenge with a group I belong to called Virtual Online Learning. We were tasked with writing five blog posts, and if we were feeling really industrious, a sixth, bonus, post. This is my bonus post. That is not what I mean in the title of this post though. When I say “the bonus of Virtual Online Learning” what I am really talking about is the great set of new friends that I see emerging from my involvement with the Virtual Online Learning group. The real bonus is the fact that there are people scattered all over this world that I have the opportunity to communicate with and to become friends with through this medium of the Internet.

Another bonus that I am getting today is the great set of blog posts that I have been reading as a result of all of the other people involved in today’s challenge. There is some really good information in some of these posts. I am reminded once again that there are articulate and talented people all over. I am gratified that I get the chance to know some of them and that I get to learn from some of them. This blog post is my “Thank You” to all who have taken the time to do this challenge today. I look forward to reading your blogs on an ongoing basis.