The Weekend Writer: Blogging For Writers

Whether or not writers should blog is discussed and written about a lot. And, of course, almost everything you see and hear will tell you that you should, no matter what point you're at in your writing career.

You Should

The May/June issue of Writer's Digest includes an article called Blog Your Way to Success by Robert Lee Brewer. I think the title is a little optimistic, myself, but there's lots of good, short content in this piece. Pay particle attention to the SEO Cheat Sheet. And under Other Ways to Grow Blog Traffic I recommend Share Posts on Social Media. No one's going to come looking for you these days.

You Should But...

Jane Friedman had a post at her site back in March called How to Start Blogging: A Definitive Guide for Authors. That title was a little odd, too, because the first paragraph included the line "The average author does not benefit much from blogging." This isn't quite the "rah-rah, you go, this is going to be fun" piece you usually see related to writers blogging. It has a lot of great material, some of it similar to Brewer's, some of it unique. For instance, Friedman covers a few things about blogging that a lot of writers have trouble with. Frequency of posts, for example. I've seen blogs in which authors go months between posts, maybe doing even just a few posts a year. Friedman says new bloggers should commit to three to five times a week. Once they're established, they can relax a bit a cut back to a couple...a week.

Both articles are good reads for writers either thinking about blogging or actually into it.