BlogWritingCourse

If you haven’t registered for our next Blogging 101 course, now is the time, because we are starting up the next 8-week series on January 11.  If you have been on the waiting list, we appreciate your patience - - I know it will be worth your wait!

Blogging 101 is an instructor-led course that will guide you through all the basics of creating and establishing a new blog.  Subjects covered in the Blogging 101 curriculum include:

• What Makes A Good Blog
• Developing Your Blog Identity
• Creating Your Blog
• “About Me” Pages
• Getting Started Writing
• Building Quality Content
• Hooking Your Readers
• Blogging Etiquette and Safety
• Promoting Your Blog

With Blogging 101, you will even have a built-in audience for your first posts - - your fellow classmates!  You will have fun learning with them and from them, and getting honest feedback and comments on your blog content.  Plus, your instructor, experienced blogger and writer, Topsy Techie will hold your hand as you go step by step through the process of creating and starting your new blog.  The Blogging 101 course is more than just a class - - it is a community of people who want to see you succeed in the world of blogging.

This is going to be a terrific course, so register today and don’t miss out on your chance to start a New Blog for the New Year!!

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.

One of the coolest aspects of blogging is the creativity it inspires. 

The shift toward Web 2.0 has made each person with computer access an active participant in this changing world.  We have things to say.  We have opinions and ideas on how things are, and how they ought to be.  And we have the ability to network with other people who share our same worldview.

This immediacy can be the perfect birthplace for incredible inspiration! 

For instance, a blogger who is passionate about local food may start a blog about his favorite farmer’s markets and tailgate markets.  Another local foodie may be blogging about the best restaurants in the region.  And yet another blogger is busy posting all the great family-owned businesses in the area.  These bloggers, who will probably quickly happen upon each others blogs, and begin networking, may soon come upon the idea of helping local farmers link up with local restaurants and markets in order to distribute the freshest foods at the most reasonable prices.  It is a win/win situation for everyone - - thanks to some forward-thinking bloggers!

Other examples of this type of positive blogging include the SochiReporter project.  Sochi, Russia is slated to host the Winter Olympics in 2014.  In preparation for this event,  a seminar was created for some of the top journalism and IT students from local universities.  The focus of the seminar was helping these young men and women, many of whom had never blogged before, to cover all different aspects of the preparation that goes into readying a city for the Olympic stage.  The students will be reporting on the changes in their city from their own unique perspectives.  It is likely to be a one-of-a-kind project with fascinating results!

Then you may have also heard the story of a missing teenager from Denver, who was reconnected with her family this past April thanks largely to the efforts of bloggers and twitterers.  Notifications of the Amber Alert connected with the teen went out far and wide across the World Wide Web to help locate the missing girl. 

These are all just examples of how blogging can draw people together for a common cause.  If you have been thinking of blogging as a solitary activity taking place in one room from one computer, and going out to the faceless abyss, it is time to reconsider!  Every person sitting behind that keyboard and screen is interwoven in a complicated and beguiling mesh of thoughts, ideas, and potential for positive change.

Wouldn’t you like to become part of something like that??

Until Next Time,

If you are a relative newbie to the world of blogging, you may or may not know much about Twitter.  I tend to find that a lot of Twitterers are bloggers.  I became kind of curious about the relationship between the two.  Here are some of my thoughts about the Twitter/blogging connection.

1. Bloggers are often told that Twitter is a good way to grow their blog readership.  First of all, you can easily feed your blog to Twitter, so that each time you blog, your new post is announced as a Tweet.  If discussion builds around either your post, or your tags, then you can quickly add a follower or two.  Also, your website or blog is prominently displayed in your Twitter profile, so that your followers can find out about it if they stop in. 
2. Twitter is kind of an in-between-blog-posts vehicle for some people.  Blogs are generally at least a couple of paragraphs long.  You have something to say, and you take a few minutes (or in my case, occasionally a whole darn hour) to compose your thoughts and put them down in your blog.  But what about when something comes to mind that you may not have time to write a whole post about, but you still want to share?  You tweet it.  140 little characters of burning info that just can’t wait until the next post?  You tweet it. 
3. Twitter is the ultimate networking tool.  Whether or not we quite accept it, blogging is about building networks.  But in most cases, network building for bloggers can take a long time.  Network building on Twitter, however, is much faster, and there are multiple ways to push it forward even more quickly: TwittGroups has a seemingly unending list of ways to network with people of similar interests, backgrounds, work affiliations, geographic locations, etc.  And building a network on Twitter is a highly effective way of getting new people to find out about your blog.

If you have a blog, or are thinking about starting a blog, you might want to give Twitter a chance.  It is an effective jump-start for building blog traffic, and networking with other like-minded bloggers.

Until next time,

We are completing the 8th and final week of our most recent Blog Writing Course.  It has been such a fun process to see the new blogs go from just ideas to blog outlines to full-fledged weblogs with sidebar content, fun headers, a growing archive of posts, and even the occasional comment feedback! 

One of the most successful parts of the course is always the collaborative aspect of blog-building.  Through each step of the way, the course-mates are ready and willing to provide constructive criticism that prods the newbie bloggers on to building the best possible blog.  And once their blogs are in place, these fellow students then become each other’s instant blogroll, providing comments on new posts and encouragement on any changes or updates they may make.

At the end of the course, the students receive their certificate of completion, along with a chicklet they may proudly display on their new blog signifying that they have successfully completed the Blogging 101 blog writing course. 

The following are a sampling of the blogs that recently earned this distinction:

Homeschool on the Edge of Nowhere

Traveling Jones

KickAss Sue C

Mary’s Musings

Homeschooler Cafe

Natural Health Explained

Jewelers Fast Forward

Linda’s Long View

Go Teach It On The Mountain

Cool To Homeschool

K-12 Online Teachers

Decisions, Decisions

Choosing Our Global Destiny

If you would like to learn how to create your own blog in a supportive, collaborative atmosphere, Blogging 101 might be just the class for you!  Sign up today, and you too will be able to say you are a Blog Writing Course Alumnae!

When I first started my blog, Topsy-Techie, I didn’t consider myself a Mom Blogger.  In fact, I hadn’t even heard of the term before.  Yes, I had a blog.  And yes, that blog was about my chaotic, tech-infused life with my family - - but I didn’t know I had a category! Now, of course, I realize that I am smack dab in the middle of the cultural revolution that is: Mom Blogging.

Mommy Blogging is basically a term for moms who use blogging as an outlet for their daily frustrations, struggles, and triumphs.  For stay-at-home and work-at-home moms, it can be an especially important outlet, since daily conversations for them can sometimes be limited to topics such as crackers vs pretzels, who gets reward stars for using their “inside voice”, or inquiries into just who put the whole roll of toilet paper into the toilet.  When you are home with kids everyday, blogging can become your chief connection with the world beyond the four walls of your house. And women need social interaction with other adults!

Moms also make terrific bloggers because they tend to be experts on almost everything.  If it involves medicine, a hammer, a book, a nail file, a newspaper, a paintbrush, an ironing board, a pep talk, a garden hose, or a leotard, we can probably blog about it.  Moms are, by nature, required to be multitalented, so they have a lot to offer in the way of advice and instruction.  They also tend to follow a wide variety of media, and have at least some knowledge about subjects as diverse as politics, pop culture, and psychology.  For this reason, they have a wide pool of topics to choose from to keep their blogs interesting.

When it comes to advertising power, Mommy Bloggers may just have the corner of the market. Because they are often the key purchasing agent for their household, their opinions on products and services carry a lot of weight in the corporate world.  That makes them a big demographic that internet advertisers want to reach.  Google Adsense, Blogher, Adbrite, and others make specific efforts to woo successful Mom Bloggers.  And stay-at-home moms are finding other creative ways to make money off of their blogs as well, such as writing product reviews, cross-posting on paid blogsites, and advertising their own home-made products and services.

Moms blog for many reasons: to keep their sanity, to chronicle their kids milestones and experiences, to vent, to engage in adult conversation, to give and receive advice, to network with moms in similar situation, to make extra money at home, etc.  Blogging validates the challenging, heart-wrenching, and often thankless job of being a mom.  If you are a mom who has been thinking about starting a blog, we’d love to help.  We offer two online courses to get you off and running.  The first course, Get Ready To Blog, is an automated introductory course to the world of blogging for those new to the idea.  The second course, Blogging 101, is a professionally taught course that will guide you every step of the way from setting up and designing your new blog, to writing quality content and growing a readership.  We believe moms deserve to have the best, clearest, and least time-consuming instruction available, and that is just what our courses offer.  So sign up today!

Until next time,

The most asked question by new bloggers is always…”How can I drive traffic to my blog?”  We’ve talked about many traffic-building ideas in this blog, but today we are going to explore one we haven’t yet covered.

One of the easiest, most painless, and free ways to increase traffic to your blog is by participating in a blog carnival.  For those of you unfamiliar with blog carnivals, the best way to explain them is to compare them to well…a carnival.  Just as a carnival travels from town to town, blog carnivals travel from blog to blog.  And just as a carnival draws a crowd…so does a blog carnival!

A blog carnival begins with a host - - a blogger who is willing to oversee the carnival, choose the topic and date of publication,take submissions, promote the upcoming carnival, and ultimately gather the submissions and publish them in a single post.  The host, though, is reliant on submitters - - bloggers who are willing to follow the guidelines of the carnival and submit a blog post from their blog that corresponds with the carnival theme.  Finally, you have the readers - - folks who are interested in the carnival subject and enjoy coming to a one-stop-shopping destination where they can read posts related to that subject.

You can see that the possibilities for blog promotion are tremendous with a blog carnival.  The host benefits by having submitters become familiar with his or her site, by networking with like-minded bloggers, and by receiving lots of hits on his blog following the carnival posting.  But even carnival participants can see spikes in traffic after their post has been featured in the carnival.  A carnival is a chance to showcase your work, and without much effort, readers will be flocking to your site to see more of what you have to offer.  A blog carnival directly links to one of your posts, so readers who have never heard of you before will click on your link to see what you have to say about the topic they are interested in.

Blog carnivals can be on almost any subject.  If you would like to find a blog carnival that matches your interests, go to Blogcarnival.com, which is a directory of all ongoing carnivals.  Not only is it a great way to increase traffic for your blog, but it is also a terrific outlet for meeting people with similar interests.

If you would like to learn more specific ways to grow your blog, sign up for our eight-week online blogging course, where you will cover all aspects of blogging from building a blog to writing quality content to promoting your blog.  This instructor-led course will guide you every step of the way toward creating a successful blog.  So….step right up!

Until next time,

One of the first decisions you will have to make, if you create your blog through our Blogging 101 course, is whether or not to be anonymous. This was a tough decision for me.  I was so appreciative of all the advice I got through the class about blogging safety, and it gave me so much to think about.  Originally, since I am a freelance writer, and have many articles published on the web, I thought it would be a great idea to connect my blog with my writing website, and have people be able to connect the dots.  But then, when faced with the decision, I went against plan, and decided to keep my blog, Topsy-Techie, anonymous.  Looking back, I am pretty pleased with the decision….and here are some of the reasons why.

1. As “Topsy-Techie”, I am free to be opinionated.  In my freelance writing, I am often presenting information in a logical, unbiased way.  But in my blog, I can speak for, or against just about anything, and no one will be sitting there comparing my opinions with my freelance factoids. 
2. Topsy-Techie can make fun of herself, and her family, and no one gets embarrassed.  I have let only a few close friends know about my blog, and you can be sure that I won’t be mentioning them in it!  That way, I can let loose and tell it like it is in the Topsy-Techie household.  My kids don’t have to be afraid that their friends are going to find out that they secretly suck their thumb at night (they don’t…chill, kids!)  And hubby doesn’t have to stress out when I air some of his (literally) dirty laundry.  Blog anonymity is great for keeping families intact!
3. I can make friends without feeling like I have to invite them over for coffee.  My blog has allowed me to meet some really neat people.  People that I truly enjoy chatting with on the computer, but might or might not be so pleased to hang out with in real life.  Thanks to blog-etiquette, my community of fellow bloggers understand our limits and restrict ourselves to blog comments…not late night phone calls asking each other to babysit.
4. It’s just safer.  I share a lot of personal details about my life, my home, and my family on my blog.  Why lose sleep over whether Joe Schmoe, and his newfound parole status, is spending his nights trying to locate my exact whereabouts because of something I let slip in my blog??

Just as I have many reasons for my status as an anonymous blogger, you might can come up with just as many for why you choose to “let it all hang out.”  If you are a fearless blogger, who writes under your actual name, how about sharing in the comments section why you made that decision, and how it has worked for you.  Whether or not to blog anonymously is a big decision, so before you make up your mind, get all the facts.  To find out more about blog safety and anonymity, sign up for one of our blogging courses today.

Until next time,

If you caught my last post, you will already be familiar with the blogging trials and tribulations of my buddy “Marge.” Understandably, Marge has forsaken her desire to become a blogger because of the many roadblocks she has hit along the way to setting up her first blog.  But I have good news for Marge, and for you….there is an easier way to learn to blog.  You don’t have to go it alone.  You don’t have to be a technical wizard.  In fact, you don’t even have to be familiar with blogging at all to get started.  You just have to have a desire to write, and a willingness to learn how to put that writing out into cyberspace, so that others can read and interact with it.

That’s where BlogWritingCourse.com comes in.  We have two blogging classes designed for beginning bloggers.  The first class, Get Ready to Blog, is a free automated guide through the basics of blogging.  You will learn the lingo of blogging, explore safety issues, compare blogging platforms, and examine different genres of blogging.  This course will prepare you for our complete eight-week blogging class, Blogging 101.  This course is led by an experienced, successful blogger and teacher, who will guide you every step of the way through creating a theme for your blog, designing and setting it up, writing quality posts, and building your audience. 

One of the biggest advantages of the course is that you will have a built-in following for your first blog posts, as your fellow students in the course will be reading and commenting on your initial efforts.  This peer group of beginning bloggers is one of the key components of the Blogging 101 course, and it is what makes it so effective…and fun!   As a Blog Writing Course alumni, I can vouch for the fact that by the time you have finished the class, you will not only have learned how to blog, but will also have built a community of fellow bloggers that you will continue to follow.  

So Marge, if you are reading this, I hope you see now that you don’t have to learn how to blog by trial and error.  By signing up for our blogging classes, you will have all the tools you need to create a blog you can be proud of.  Why stress out, when you can learn to blog the easy way! 

If you, too, want to learn how to blog the easy way, sign up for one of our blogging classes today.  It’s that easy!

Until next time,