BlogWritingCourse

Week six of the Blogging 101 course is all about building community.  Starting with the simplest of things - - like commenting on blogs that are similar to yours and getting noticed - - to more involved techniques, such as starting up a Twitter account, we looked at many different ways to make your blog feel more like someone’s front porch than just a rest stop along the journey.

It is important that readers see your blog as a “hub” that they can go to for support, encouragement, advice, etc.  This is one of the biggest ways to draw traffic and keep it! 

Of course, with the Blogging 101 course, you have a built-in community from the get-go.  Your fellow classmates visit your blog and give both positive feedback and constructive criticism that will help you make your blog the best it can possibly be. 

We’ve had a few more students add their blog addresses this week, so here is an updated list of course blogs…drop by and leave a comment if you can!

• Lifting My Eyes to the Hills
• Faith and a Full House
• Blog of a Free-Form Scholar
• Never Just a Housewife
• Pansy Colored Glasses
• Seeing Through the Illusion
• Moment by Moment
• Black Belt Breakfast of Champions
• Stay at Home / Work at Home

The last two weeks have been a blur!  Many of our students have been incredibly busy in their personal lives, so many of them have been playing “catch-up” with their course assignments.  That’s the great thing about a course like this one, though…it is flexible enough to bend and flow with even the busiest of schedules!

The most exciting thing has been seeing the blogs start to fill with content.  The course “winner” for most prolific writer definitely goes to the blogger of Lifting My Eyes to the Hills, who took on a daily meme right from the get-go!  That’s a way to shoot right out of the starting gates!

But other blogs have started to fill with content as well, and the bloggers have been looking at ways to get inspired, to fight writer’s block, and how to add a little “pizzazz” to their posts to keep things interesting. 

Week Five has been focused on the “little things” that can be added to your blog to give it that extra “something.”  And they are also dutifully attempting to visit each of their classmates’ new blogs in order to leave comments of encouragement and constructive criticism.

If you’d like to check out the different approaches of some of our blogging students, take a minute to visit these blogs:

• Pansy Colored Glasses
• Never Just a Housewife
• Blog of a Free-Form Scholar
• Faith and a Full House
• Moment by Moment

Next week our Blogging 101 students will start building community around their blogs.  This is probably the single most important component of traffic-building, and we will be looking at several different ways to create that sense of community.

It has been an exciting week of lessons at Blogging 101!  This was the week to focus on blogging safety, including how much information each blogger feels comfortable sharing on their blog.  This always depends heavily on the type of blog you have, so of course business bloggers usually will share a lot of information, whereas mom bloggers keep things a little closer to the vest.

Another thing we focused on this week was creating an effective “About Me” page.  This important aspect of a blog is sometimes located on its own page of the blog, but other times is handled right within the blog sidebar.  Our students for this session had a mixture of ways of going about this task.

The final task of the week was exploring blog design a little more closely.  We gave comprehensive instructions for how to use a customized header to draw attention to your blog, and a few of our students have really created headers to be proud of!!

In week four, we will actually begin the process of writing, and creating quality content for our blogs.  We will also dig a little deeper into blog graphics and design and how they can make a big difference in how our blog is received.

If these activities sound like something you would be interested in, then head over to the left hand sidebar, and add yourself to the waiting list for the next Blogging 101 session.  I look forward to seeing you there!