Let’s kick off a new section, Quick Tips, with one about blogging since, well, guess what I’m doing right now?
Tips will feature short snippets on a wide variety of topics. By keeping them short, hopefully I’ll be able to update several times a week as things come up during my day-to-day work. I’m easily in front of a computer 12 hours a day and this is a way to integrate blogging into my day, provide useful content and meet one of my goals for this year. (This does not absolve me from writing longer posts.)
Quick Tip: Figure out what you want to say.
One of the biggest reasons why blogs fail is because the author doesn’t know what he wants to say. He’ll flounder about and write a variety of posts on a variety of topics. He has no goals for his blog and, consequently, finds it easy to post with random and ever decreasing frequency.
Before deciding to create a blog figure out what you want to write about and who you want to write it for. Be specific. Is there a topic where you have something meaningful to contribute? In my case, web design was too broad and other areas were already too well covered. I didn’t feel I could make enough of a contribution. In my case, it ended up being less about the topic and more about the audience.
Two great sites that helped me figure this out (and that I now follow) are ReadWriteWeb and Copyblogger.
