Blogging 101 - So You Want To Blog?

The word blog is an interesting one. Shortened from weblog, the blog has become a world phenomenon. There are blogs in many different languages and many different countries. Anyone from the average guy down the street to your favorite celebrity has a blog. From personal to business and anything in between is fair game for a blog. The blog can be a powerful thing and reach hundreds of thousands of people everyday.

So you have decided to join the millions of people around the world that are blogging. The first thing you need to do is to decide what kind of blog this will be. Arguably, the most common blogs are personal ones. Business blogs are generally run by companies that focus on their specific company and the news that associates with it. So unless this will be about your business, your blog will most likely be personal. The next step is to choose a topic. The topic for your blog can be just about anything…

• News


• Sports


• Games


• Technology


• Science


• Everyday life

Those are just a few general subjects which have many topics included in each of them. The goal is to write about what you are interested in. It will be hard to sustain a blog if the focus of it isn’t something you are passionate about. When thinking of a topic, keep it less general than sports or news. Pick a field in one of those broader subjects like football or politics. Search around the internet for blogs about the topic you chose and keep track of how many there are. Take a look at how long they have been around, the numbers posts and the quality of them, and how many comments they get on them.

Knowing your “competition” will help your blog eventually surpass them. I use the term competition loosely as hopefully you will become allies, but they are competing in your topic field for visitors and readers. If you feel that your topic is just too saturated with blogs, don’t be discouraged. Most likely you will still be able start a successful blog, it will just have to be that much better. Later on in this series I will be giving tips on how to do this.