Following is a summary of an article from Daily Blog Tips. I thought the five “mistakes” presented in the article are worth reposting because, although we may know them, we no doubt make them over and over.
So here’s a reminder.
I’ve summarized them below as tips (to do) rather than mistakes.
Last night my blogging group met at fellow blogger Sandi Baron’s house with her personal techie guy, Jason, to learn more about computer tricks. We are writers, after all, we write. Period. Generally speaking, we don’t do techie stuff. None of us really knows, no care to know, how the mysterious mechanics of the cyber world work. We only know that it all works and that it is important to the success of our blogging endeavors.
Oh, if only someone would take our words and feed them into the magical web of the internet stuff for us, we would be happy – oh, so happy!
But the truth is, we’ve got to do it ourselves.
So we asked Jason for help …
… after a delicious dinner and several glasses of wine …
Jason, a tall, young, quiet man with a gentle spirit and a logical mind was truly brave as he worked with four older, A-type women with quirky visions and scattered brains. As he demonstrated how to use all those buttons on blogger’s dashboard on Sandi’s desktop computer, we sat behind him with our laptops and tried to follow along. Adding pictures, changing the design and layout, linking, and understanding the purpose and value of linking were some of our lessons.
A couple of hours later we smiled complacently behind glassy eyes and said “yes, yes, we understand”.
I’m glad it’s a weekend now because I hope to spend some time practicing what we learned. Only then will we really know if we understood or not.
I write two blogs for a jeweler in Israel – one focuses on bracelets and the other on necklaces. The client makes hand-blown glass bottle pendants with religious symbolism and enhanced with sterling silver and crystals. The bottles can be filled with holy water from the Jordan River or from a natural spring that is sacred to followers of Islam, or with a scroll with a favorite scripture written on it. They are really cool pendants and quite unique.
This week I was pleasantly surprised as the client sent me two necklaces as a gift (not instead of, but in addition to) my monthly fee. What a wonderful surprise! Below are pictures of the necklaces I received this week in the mail:
What a wonderful week we have had! Five of us shared in a total of 12 hours of intensive blogging lessons. As participatns set up new blogs, we learned about the Blogger platform – the dashboard, settings, design, how to compose, edit, save, and publish; how to follow, leave comments, and subscribe. We learned how to link and how to upload pictures and videos. We brainstormed for ideas and followed up by writing out drafts of posts, profiles, and bio-boxes. We learned about gadgets – whaqt they are, how to find them and how to put them on our blogs. As we learned about SEO, article writing, and how to build traffic, we explored various examples already on the web and various sites to upload and publish promotional articles. We talked about the value of online and blogging communities and participated in some as practice.
We stayed focused on our work making the most efficient use of our time. It was an amazing and energetic dynamic because we learned about each other as well, but never allowed personal interjections to stray us from the main focus of learning about blogging.
Thank you, Ladies, for a wonderful, productive week! Thank you for your meaningful input and questions and for all your enthusiasm. I am especially greatful that you have joined me in this endeavor.
I look forward to our monthly gatherings and continued learning. Until we meet again, blog on!
Comments I received from the workshop:
I am having fun with blogging, thanks for the help with it!!
Thank you so much, River, for teaching us during our blogging workshop. You did a fantastic job. Our group will be posting a lot and making links to others because of your efforts. You are the best.
Your blogging contributions are priceless. I look at my blog a new way thanks to you. I got my book in the mail called: The Everything Blogging Book by Aliza Risdahl. I will share it with you.
When I am free writing from brainstorming and prompts I sometimes get confused as to whether I am writing a blog post or an article. They are similar, or can be, and the lines of definition are blurry and vague. I can’t answer the question exactly, but I do have a current option that I am using now as a guideline:
Blog posts are more personal; they center on personal experience, opinion; they are written in a style that is more interactive by engaging your readership. Blogs are chatty. Articles on the other hand, are informational, centered less on personal knowledge and more on legitimate research. Articles fit into established formulas and can be written to specific templates. Blog posts can have structure, but it isn’t required; articles need to be structured. You can get away with writing a blog post that lacks a main point and supporting points, but an article needs these things. Blog posts can be anything including pictures, links, video, text, or any combination. An article must have text and the other things have to be relevant in the supporting role. A blog post might be commentary on an article or someone else’s blog post whereas an article would be more of a critical review.
You will find your own definition as you write them both, but maybe this brief summary will help you determine where to post the stuff you are writing.
I just started teaching an intensive blogging workshop. We met on Friday for 3 hours at Panera and began with brainstorming and planning, talked about promotion, and ended with everyone setting up their own blog. It was so exciting to see participants “get it” and to share in the joy and excitement as they created their visions. I’m going to eventually turn our work into worksheets and information to post here along with a comprehensive ebook about blogging.
Today we’ll have our next session and work more on blog designing including layout, widgets, etc., and what you can do with a blog. We will also learn about SEO writing. We’ll follow up at our third session with an emphasis on article writing.
I’ve learned a lot in the last 2 years of online writing, but I have so much more I want and need to learn. I’m at a point now that I need human interaction and feedback, so this workshop is aimed at sharing what I know and asking for help with what I hope to learn.
We are off to a great start: four committed and enthusiastic participants, each with a specific direction, all with similar dreams. The fourth session will be focused on tying up loose ends, follow-up and review. At that time we will also deal with questions regarding what we still want and need to learn. It is my hope that we will continue to meet regularly to continue our learning and to share with each other to foster the learning.
I would really like for us to each take responsibility for several of the questions generated by our meetings and research on our own with the promise to come back to the group to teach what we have learned.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I have had several people tell me that they are not able to leave comments on my blog. I have also had a hard time leaving comment on other people’s blogs at times. This prompted me to think it might be a good idea to have a basic blogging workshop. We talked about this in one of our monthly journaling meetings recently and everyone agreed it would be helpful. I realized during our discussion however, that we have a lot of questions and a lot of different needs, so I thought we should break down the content of the workshop and make it really simple. I thought we should break down information about blogs and blogging into simple steps beginning with the most basic information such as how to search for blogs, save and organize blogs, and interact in the blogging community. I also realized that we would need to hold a series of workshops in order to cover all that needed to be covered and to give people time to practice what they learn and feel comfortable to move on to the next step.
A common frustration for people as they work with technology is the fact that everyone knows something different, so when you ask a question, the answer is usually filled with terms and information unfamiliar so you never really get your question answered, but instead, find yourself with even more questions. A lot of people feel overwhelmed when this happens and maybe even “stupid” and they simply resolve themselves to “not being that much into computers anyway.”
Well, I wanted to be sure that no one felt intimidated about asking any question and that the answers would help identify what terms and concepts needed to be explained. This is the premise and rationale for the first basic blogging workshop.
We held the first workshop at my house a few weeks ago. It was aimed to focus on reading and interacting with blogs, not creating one or learning more about how to improve one participants may have already created. We learned about the different kinds of blogs, how to search and surf to find blogs, how to bookmark, save, and organized blogs, and how to interact by posting comments.
After the workshop, I could see that while we had basically hit the target on what we wanted to cover, it has been a bit of a mess. People doing their own thing, people helping other people, people no knowing what we were talking about, etc. all led to an active, exciting workshop, but maybe not the most efficient. So ever since then, I have been thinking, evaluating, and processing my ideas. I am creating worksheets and handouts to make the workshop better next time, and in the process, I’ve realized that what I am really creating is an ebook of blogging basics for beginners.
I am going to post at least some of the parts here on this blog and may eventually have a free ebook for readers to download. Your feedback is very welcome as I work through this! Next week I am hosting a re-do of that first workshop to test out the curriculum materials before I post them. I would like to invite my readers to tell me what questions you have about blogging and send me tips about your own blog-reading, blog-interacting experiences. This is a learning opportunity for all of us and I am just very grateful for the questions that keep me moving forward.
* Next month the second workshop will be all about how to set up and create your own blog!
I've made a decision: Hubpages is my current focus.
I am still struggling with the learning cure regarding how to get noticed for my online writing. I’ve got a lot of stuff out there, but what I’m lacking is the marketing promotions to attract traffic. I do alright with my SEO articles written for clients, but those don’t have my name on them, so what I’m doing with those articles is promoting the work of my clients, not my own work.
I have been so busy writing for other people that I haven’t been able to devote my energies to building traffic so I can write more for myself. There are so many “how-to-bring-traffic-to-your-site” tutorials and each one takes me in a whole new direction. What I’ve got is my foot just over the start line of too many races and I’m not even on any specific road!
I’m frustrated and overwhelmed.
So what I’ve done this week is assess and analyze all my starts. I’ve researched and read everything I could find on all the companies, websites, and vague ideas where I have, at one time or another, thought I could find the answers to my questions. I still think they are all good starts, but I simply can’t do them all (not now, anyway). So I ordered them according to my own criteria – basically on a whim. Based on things like how clear the language is, the comments made by other writers within the community, my impression of the founders, creators, and staff, and that ever faithful “gut feeling”, I stacked my options in numerical order according to how well I liked them. Then I chose only one to run with and put the others in the filing cabinet.
