cape meares oregon and the westchester press

Taking a wide angle view of blogging can help me see where I’m going as I work. (This is Cape Meares on the Oregon Coast, by the way.)

Along the way to learning how to self publish a book, I researched blogging, and saw that many resources suggested posting a blog every day.

Blogging every day sounded overwhelming to me.

It still does, which is why I don’t blog every day.

The whole idea behind blogging, or at least the one related to self publishing a book, is to use the right keywords (ones that readers will be entering in a search engine like Google) and write really interesting, useful, engaging, current, accurate, and readable content, and do it regularly. This builds traffic, and a readership, and an audience… for our books!

A good idea, but still. Overwhelming.

So I developed a system:

  • I brainstormed ideas, and wrote them down in any form. On paper, in an idea database, in a word document, in a spreadsheet… anything.
  • I organized those ideas into categories. Ideas usually can be grouped – and those groupings are the Category. Assigning the category in the blog platform makes it easy for readers to find the topics they are interested in.
  • I printed out a blank month from my calendar program – on paper. Enough with having everything inside the computer, I need to old-school it with paper and pen sometimes.
  • I added any seasonal holidays to that blank calendar sheet, so that I could tailor that day’s post to the season if I wanted to. Christmas always comes as a surprise to me, and this helps.

Since I have too many topics I am trying to cover, I assigned one day a week for each, minus Fridays. If I were blogging about one topic, I’d maybe assign a day for each category or such…
For instance,  I am blogging twice a week at www.TheWestchesterPress.com, instead of three times a week (I couldn’t keep up with three times a week – given my other blogging efforts which are about to be revealed in my next sentence)… actually, I can’t even keep up with twice a week.

Many of my ideas could be broken up into more than one short post, so the calendar filled up rapidly.
After all this, I take one day a week and write the posts, add a picture, and schedule it for the designated day.
I write the posts in advance – as many as I can do on a Saturday, for instance, and when something timely comes up, I can just move the pre-scheduled post to another day, and insert my extemporaneous post.

Series are the most fun for me. Like, “Famous People Who Met My Grandfather” for my soon-to-be-released aviation biography, or “Egg Artist Spotlight” for artists doing amazing things with blown eggshells. My quest to turn my www.TheFreeRooster.com blog at into a book is a series of posts, as I use each tool I can find to accomplish the task.

My system makes an overwhelming task do-able. I see increased traffic every time I post. And I see growing traffic each month since I began to post regularly. If the content is useful, people will read it. If the keywords are correct, search engines will find it.

And now I’ve posted a blog about posting a blog – BlogElegant. Blelegant!

 

 

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