Become a Blogger - Selling Yourself to the Online Community Via Blogging

[Bloggeries]

Become a Blogger - Selling Yourself to the Online Community Via Blogging

Looking to start a blog? Excited about sharing your thoughts with people around the world? That’s great, you should be. You probably have a lot of insightful things to say. But WAIT! STOP! You may not want to just hop on the web and start writing down your stream of consciousness. Many people have enough trouble making sense of their own stream of consciousness, and they may not be interested in trying to decipher yours.

If you’re looking to start blogging online, remember that you’re trying to sell yourself to the online community. The online community may not be paying you with money (although a savvy blogger can make some decent money through Google AdSense), but the online community will be paying you with their time. If you’re writing online, you should be doing it in hopes that somebody will take the time to read it. If you simply wanted to write down your thoughts, you could do it in a diary.


To that end, you should consider what people might want to read, and specifically what you can write that people might want to read. I would imagine that an astronaut’s blog might be something worth reading on the internet, but I certainly would not be qualified to write it. That said, if you are a living, breathing human person who has any semblance of a social life, a work life, or a hobby, you probably have something to write about that someone around the world might be interested in reading.


Identify it. Do you get excited about collecting vintage baseball cards from the 50s and 60s? So do thousands of people all over the United States. Are you a wine connoisseur, having traveled from Napa Valley to Italy to South Africa to taste all of the world’s fine wines? There are lots of people out there just like you waiting to share in your experience. Do you just work a boring 9-5 job in a cubicle but can add some humor to the situation for others with the same plight? Do it. Maybe you just have a magnetic personality with a desire to write. You can be the Oprah of the internet!


My point is that your blog needs a theme, it needs a hook. It needs a reason for people to keep coming back for more, begging you with each visit to write the next installment. On the other hand, don’t expect to be able to accomplish this for every person who surfs the web. If you try to cater to everyone out there, you will end up with a bland, watered down blog that doesn’t offend anyone but really doesn’t inspire anyone either. Find your niche and be passionate about it.


Once you think you’ve identified your niche, look for other blogs that might occupy the same niche. Are they lacking in anything? Can you add to the current cannon of blogs in your particular niche? My guess is that you can, and you should be excited about it. Blogging offers the individual a chance like no other to create something new and share it with anyone across the world that cares to take a look. Are you ready to sell yourself to them?

- One thing that we are at Bloggeries is busy. We're busy trying to make this the ultimate resource for bloggers worldwide. I'm in the process of having written an a-z tutorial on blogging. This article below was written by someone applying, it's a good article but I've decided to go with someone else so I posted this here for you to read. Any thoughts?