Choosing a Blog Topic

Christopher O’Leary had been working as a reporter covering finance and investment, first as a staff writer in Manhattan and then as a freelancer in western Massachusetts when he decided to start a blog. “It was meant, basically, as a way to let off steam,” he says.

A book about presidential gravesites he’d been working on in his spare time had stalled. He wanted “to write something that was fun, that I could dash off over a cup of coffee.” A passionate fan of pop and rock music, O’Leary, browsing the Web, came upon a blog by the British music writer Ian MacDonald discussing every song that had ever hit No. 1 on the British charts.

That gave him his idea: Why not do the same for a single popular musician? But which one? “I wanted someone who had a career that spanned decades and that had a lot of variety,” O’Leary said. He settled on the protean and prolific David Bowie, even though, he admits, “I wasn’t even a big fan.”

O’Leary’s goal: to write a blog that would go song by song, in chronological order, through Bowie’s 40-year career. “I had a listener’s perspective,” he recalls, realizing that wasn’t enough. “So I learned to read music, I studied music theory, and I learned to play the guitar so I could understand the songs better.”

He began the blog—called Pushing Ahead of the Dame (bowie songs.wordpress.com)—in the summer of 2009; five years later, he had written more than 500 posts and had a book contract. The book, Rebel Rebel, is two volumes.

O’Leary had found an unfilled niche and stuck with the subject until he became recognized as an expert. A lot of bloggers lack that kind of staying power.

Before you start a blog, ask yourself these questions:

• Am I ready to spend a lot of time on this topic? O’Leary says he spends about 20 hours a week on his blog. Blogs take a lot more work than you think. Your topic should be something that not only interests you, but about which you are eager to learn more. Or it should be a topic about which you are already an expert (be honest with yourself) and believe you have valuable information or points of view to contribute to a discussion.
• Can I get an unlimited number of posts out of this topic? No matter how much a topic interests you and no matter how much you already know about a topic, you may quickly—surprisingly quickly—feel as though you’ve run out of things to say. Pick a topic that will provide you with a wealth of material, and be prepared to put in the time researching it.
• How committed am I to posting to my blog regularly? Anyone can fire up some blogging software and, in 15 minutes, have a blog up on the Internet for all to see. The Internet is littered with such efforts—blogs with a handful of posts, begun with good intentions and abandoned. There’s no sin in that, of course (and there are such things as short-term blogs), but if you’re reading this book you’re already somewhat serious about blogging. A blog updated once a month, or even several times a month, will attract very few readers, at least until you’re established and perhaps have emerged as a hub for bloggers writing on similar themes.
• When during the course of each week will I set aside time for blogging? You have to treat blogging as a job or as something for which you will make time. Consider the parallel of learning a musical instrument. To play it well takes daily practice, a routine— held sacred—to improve your skills. Blogging is no different. Author Mark Leccese spent several years as a freelancer writing about books. He learned that every author he interviewed had a writing routine: a set time to write each day, usually with a set number of words to produce in that time. Be professional about your blog.
• Can I effectively illustrate my blog? We live in a visual world today, and blogs that can rely on photos or graphics to help tell their story have a better chance of enduring. Rule of thumb: every blog post should have at least one image. It could be a photo, it could be a simple chart, it could be a drawing—any image that adds meaning to your blog post. Some blog posts will be nothing but images, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 7, “Beyond Words.” But always keep in mind one very important warning: Do not use images in your blog to which someone else holds the copyright. Either create the images yourself or use images that are free of copyright restriction.

The Sauce Bauce and Corona Del Mar Today

When Mark assigns students to choose a blog topic, some struggle and some know right away what they want to blog about. Tom Carroll, a volleyball player and a guy who seems to always be smiling, got right to work writing about buffalo wings. He became (using the current slang for someone awesome) the Sauce Bauce.

Why wings? “I really wanted to find the best buffalo wings in Boston,” he said. “I love buffalo wings, and knowing I was going to be in Boston for the next few years, I wanted to find the place where I could definitively go for the best wings.”

With each post, Carroll took a photo of the restaurant where he tucked into some wings and included it with the post, and at the bottom of each post he gave each eatery two rankings: “Overall Rating” on a scale of 1 to 10, and “Wing-Sesh Rating,” which ran from A to F (more slang: a sesh is a session).

His posts were lively, detailed, and fun. “The reason I went with a light-hearted and humorous voice was simple: food is fun. Why would someone want to read a serious food blog? People eat to relax; they should be relaxed and having a good time when they read about food, too.”

Carroll followed all the steps to write a good blog: He was prepared to spend time researching his blog (given the topic, wouldn’t you be?). He knew there were dozens and dozens of places in Boston that serve wings. He was committed himself to his topic, and, even with his busy schedule of classes, an internship, and volleyball practices and games, he just knew he could make time for some wing sessions.

Amy Senk works 40 hours a week—and sometimes more—as a blogger. A former newspaper reporter, Senk decided in 2009 to start a local news blog for Corona Del Mar, the seacoast town in Southern California where she lives.

Some days she puts in 12 hours reporting, writing, and posting local news to her blog, Corona Del Mar Today (www.coronadelmartoday.com). Other days, she pre-schedules stories she has already written or edited to appear on her blog at intervals, which keeps the blog fresh and keeps readers coming back.

“In the beginning,” Senk says, “I was very covert and only about four or five people knew what I was doing. I was finding my voice.

It was more bloggy and I didn’t know about various community meetings and so forth. But people began to hear about it from friends, and now it’s a must-read … I [am] very organic and very local, very word-of-mouth.”

Senk works like a reporter. She regularly checks the agendas of government boards and commissions, checks the police log, keeps in touch with local business leaders and the local PTA.

“I also get tips and news releases, and I check regularly the city’s online new business license page,” she says. “Mostly, my ideas come from living in this town and driving through it. I will notice a business has closed, or a man leading horses down the highway, or construction signs posted. My kids will come home and tell me about a major food fight at school. I kind of always am looking for news.”

Tom Carroll is a college student who loves wings; Amy Senk is an experienced reporter and a mother who loves the community in which she and her family live. They both found blog topics about which they wanted to learn more and which would provide them with an almost endless amount of material for posts.

Fernanda Rosa

“Everything that comes from blogging is a surprise”

When Fernanda Rosa travels abroad, she says she is as likely as not to have strangers cook a meal or throw a party for her. But then they’re not really strangers. They are fans of one of her two blogs, written in her native Portuguese though the Brazilian-born Rosa has lived for nearly two decades in and around the California city of Davis.

Fernanda Rosa

Rosa has blogged regularly since 2000, when the Brazilian blogosphere “was like maybe 10 people.” For the last decade, she’s primarily written a food blog titled Chucrute com Salsicha, the name of a recipe she found of her mom’s. But she still maintains her original blog, The Chatterbox, which, she says, remains a photographic and written chronicle of her life—a diary of sorts.

We caught up with Rosa, 53, by telephone at her home.

You’ve blogged for a long time. What drew you to blogging in those early days?

I have to communicate. That’s part of who I am. Also I live in an English-speaking country and I have to practice my Portuguese … [At first, the blogosphere] was like a small group. You would write something. People would react to it … It was a community. I would visit other blogs. Other blogs would visit me … We were connecting.

In 2001, there was a boom and people started discovering the blogs. I got interviewed a lot because I was one of the first ones. Then it went ballistic and everybody had a blog.

How has the blogosphere changed over the years?

Now the competition is fierce. The regional blogs are not so popular anymore. People would rather go to a specific topic. My food blog was very popular. It was famous for awhile … Now the people are stable. They come because they want recipes.

How have you evolved as a blogger?

It has changed a lot. Sometimes I’ll go to the archives to check the facts. I’ll say, “What did I do that year?” … When I go to the archives, it’s very clear to me how I’ve evolved as a writer, a person. Now I’m more self-conscious about what I write. Before, I’d say anything. I’d write about the weather, what I did, what I watched on TV.

My food blog is more like a hobby … On the food blog, I can express myself better. I think it was better for me. I cook mostly with the ingredients I find here. Where I live, in this area, they have lots of tomatoes. So I say I live in Tomato Land. When I started posting recipes of tomatoes, people would go crazy. Tomatoes are my trademark … We also have orchards of almonds. This area I live in is heaven for agriculture so it’s the best place to be for a food blog.

Of course, I write faster, too … One big thing that helped me was migrating from a camera to an iPhone. All my pictures now are taken on an iPhone. I have this system of taking them and cutting them and getting them online, which is just a snap … I’ve adjusted to my lack of time and it’s working pretty well. Sometimes I don’t post anything for a week and that’s fine … Before I would get very stressed out.

Who are your readers?

All kinds of people who speak Portuguese—in the United States, in Europe, in Brazil. For my first blog, the readers were mostly Brazilians. They were fascinated by the lifestyle in California. At the time, I didn’t work. I would just sit every morning and write about my thoughts, everything I experienced, dialogues with other people, things that happened to me. The blogosphere was small, but I would get 500 hits.

With my food blog, a lot of people were from Portugal. It opened my horizons to a lot of things. I got a job in 2005. [Now] I prepare everything on a Sunday afternoon so I have the posts ready … I compile a lot of tweets and make a post for my blog.

A lot of people don’t even go to the blog anymore. They just read it through their RSS reader. Before, I would go to my counter every day to see where they came from … Now I don’t care anymore. Still, the food blog gets like 2,000 hits a day.

You’ve met readers around the world?

People want to meet me every time I go to Brazil. They want to have a gathering. Now I don’t do that anymore. But a lot of them became my friends. The most interesting thing to me is that I went to Belgium and I met a reader there. I went to Portugal and I met a reader there. Sometimes readers cook me meals … It makes me self-conscious … When I went to Portugal, they were so excited to meet me, it was really, “Oh my gosh!” … I have had people taking pictures of my house. It was really strange.

Have you ever sought to make money as a blogger?

I chose not to do it because I feel self-conscious to make money off of a blog. For years, I got many offers. But they were all lame. I feel it would betray my readers. My blog is about me and my life and my food and my family. It’s very personal. It has all the recipes, but it has pictures of my life … Sometimes I write little things about my life. It wouldn’t feel right if I started writing about products.

My husband is sort of like, “Why don’t you want to make money?” but I have a job and I don’t think it’s worth it.

What advice would you have for today’s new bloggers?

Do it because you like it, because it’s fun. Find your niche, a subject you love. But I personally don’t expect anything from it. I do it because I like it, which is maybe why I survived all these years. Everything that comes from blogging is a surprise … Besides, if I don’t blog, what else am I going to do? I don’t garden. I’m not an athlete. I don’t run a marathon. Blogging is something that feeds my creativity. I need to have the call for the photography and the creative things I do. You have to have that in your life. Everyone has a hobby, and I blog.

Naming Your Blog

It can be difficult to choose a name. Think carefully. Avoid cute— blog readers have been cuted to death. Make the name descriptive and, if you can, active.

Tom Carroll called his blog Wings Over Boston, a play on words that gives the name some impact but still makes it clear the blog is about wings and Boston. Amy Senk named her blog as if it were a newspaper: Corona Del Mar Today.

Here are the names of the technology blogs at some of the United States’ largest newspapers:

• Bits (New York Times)
• The Switch (Washington Post)
• Digits (Wall Street Journal)
• Technology Live (USA Today)
• Tech Now (Los Angeles Times)
• SiliconBeat (San Jose Mercury News)
• TechKnow Bytes (Denver Post)
• Silicon Island (Newsday)

Then there are the major online-only tech blogs, whose names may hold no resonance for you but do in the tech world:

• Mashable
• Gizmodo
• GigaOM
• Engadget
• The Verge
• TechCrunch
• Ars Technica
• ReadWrite
• 9to5Mac

Journalism tradition has long given the name “gatekeeping” to those in the newsroom who vet the quality and value of information that flows to the public. Mark and his editors decided Gatekeeper would make it instantly obvious to the reader that he or she is looking at a blog about journalism. Note, too, that the blog doesn’t just have a name; it has a line underneath the name that explains the subject of the blog in 11 words: “Mark Leccese watches Boston and the people who report on it.”

When Christopher O’Leary sat down to begin his blog on every song David Bowie has ever recorded, he took about 10 minutes to come up with the name Pushing Ahead of the Dame. It’s an obscure play on words. There’s a Bowie song about a drag queen with the lyric “she’s known in the darkest clubs for pushing ahead of the dames,” and Bowie was sometimes known in the British rock press as “The Dame.” And so Pushing Ahead of the Dame meant keeping one step ahead of Bowie. It was clever. But, says O’Leary, “I’ve come to regret the name as it’s a bit of an ungainly title … It should’ve just been Bowiesongs,” he says, “which is how many people refer to it anyhow.”

Checking out the Competition

If you wanted to be a really good dancer, you’d carefully watch other dancers perform, right? If you wanted to be a really good bass player, you’d spend some time listening to the bass players on your favorite recording and trying to figure out what they’re doing.

The same holds true for writing blogs—for all writing, in fact. The jazz trumpet player Clark Terry always told his students that learning to play jazz is a three-step process: Imitation, Assimilation, Innovation.

Let’s apply that to writing. You need to read abundantly and widely if you want to write well. All of us, as we develop as writers, find models, writers we admire. We imitate them (taking care not to copy). As we imitate, we absorb, and, finally, we go beyond imitation to create our own voice.

If improving your writing is one reason to check out the competition as a blogger, another is to keep up to date on what’s happening in your topic area and to keep an eye on the competition.

Before you begin blogging, search the Web for other blogs on the same or similar topics about which you plan to write. Assimilate yourself into the subject. This is a big step: it can help you position your blog. So compile as complete a list as you can.

To make following your favorite blogs easier, set up an RSS reader. The best ones, most of which are available for desktop and mobile and are either inexpensive or free, are Feedly, NewsBlur, NetNews Wire, and The Old Reader.

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and once you set up an RSS reader, it will “feed” every new post on the blogs you follow into your RSS app; instead of visiting a dozen or more blogs every day, you only need to open your RSS app to read everything those blogs have published.

Pretty much every blog and website has the capability to subscribe to an RSS feed, although on many pages the RSS feed can be a little hard to find. When you go to a blog you want to include in your RSS reader, look for this icon or a box that will look something like it.

Sometimes simply clicking on the icon will add the feed from that blog to your RSS readers, and sometimes you need to copy the feed’s URL (which will read something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/websitename). On some blogs, and especially news websites, there is no RSS icon. If so, search the page for the letters “RSS.” On the home page of nytimes.com, for example, the link for RSS is at the bottom of the page in a tiny font. But once you find it and click on it, you can choose from more than 100 RSS feeds on various topics.

Coming up with Ideas for Posts

We all read things that interest us, hear things at parties, observe things as we ride the subway or bus or walk to school. The first step in finding good ideas is to be curious, to ask someone, “What’s going on?” If you see a crowd gathered in the park, find out why. If you notice that cool wings place you went to last week is now shuttered, ask questions.

Being a good blogger, like being a good reporter, starts with being interested and by gathering string—snippets of information of interest to you—on your phone, in a notebook, on a tablet, or, when all else fails, on a napkin.

Jerry Lanson spent six months in France, trying to overcome challenges of language and culture. As he did so, he turned these experiences into blog material that told English-speaking visitors something about the culture and where they could enjoy it away from the most predictable—and crowded—tourist sites.

When, for example, a French theater audience reacted with a loud “shhh” and “sortie” (“leave”) after a cellphone went off mid-movie, he wrote that reaction down in a notebook he always carries in his pocket. When his language teacher told him about a bookstore with more than 100,000 titles, struggling to survive in a tiny mountain town, he drove there. And when he noticed a passing reference to a medieval ruin on a plateau that few tourists visit, he went there, hiked it, and compared it to another ruin that draws 1.5 million visitors a year.

Lanson chronicled these and other experiences in a blog called France in the Slow Lane (www.slowlanetravel.com).

Some blogs lend themselves more to such old-fashioned skills— listening, watching, and asking—than others. But no blog in the twenty-first century should rely on these skills alone. Today, we can keep up with the world from our own little corner of it by using some great technological tools that can bring the world to our tablet, phone, or desktop. The trick is to use them well.

RSS feeds are just one such tool.

If you have a tablet computer (or a mobile phone), you can use “personal magazine” apps, which are much like RSS feeds but with a much more attractive and visual interface. Try Flipboard, Zite, Pulse, or News 360—they’re all free, so you might as well download them all, try them, and decide which ones you like best.

If you are not on Twitter and Facebook, you need to get an account and you need to get one now. The Pew Research Center reported in April 2014 that 73 percent of all Americans who use the Internet use social media networking sites. And the younger you are, the more likely you are to use Twitter and Facebook. Among Internet users 65 and older, about half use social networking sites. Among Internet users 18 to 29, almost 90 percent do.

We understand you may find these social media sites annoying and vapid. You are, for the most part, absolutely right. But Twitter and Facebook are absolutely essential for keeping up with not only what is going on in the news but also with what is being published in blogs, on the websites of magazines, and at off-beat news aggregators (think of them as “news highlighters”), such as gawker.com and fark.com. In other words, Twitter is a useful tool for coming up with ideas.

Lars Willnat and David Weaver, professors at the University of Indiana School of Journalism, surveyed more than 1,000 journalists online in late 2013. Their 2014 report, titled “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” found Twitter is the single most used social media tool among journalists. More than half of journalists in the study said they use Twitter. A quarter of the journalists said they also read blogs by other journalists.

Today, 80 percent use Twitter regularly to follow breaking news and 73 percent use it to check out what other news organizations are doing. But 60 percent of journalists also use Twitter to “find ideas for stories,” and 56 percent use it to “find additional information.”

The key to Twitter is that you need to “curate” the list of the people and news organizations you follow. Follow too many Twitter accounts and you’ll just be overwhelmed; follow too few and you’ll miss a lot of good stuff. After a while, you’ll know which Twitter users in your area link to or file interesting material. Don’t feel obligated to stick with the others.

Try this experiment: Follow 10 or 20 new accounts for a week or so to find out if they’re worth following. Check Twitter at least daily. Of those 10 or 20 new accounts, unfollow the ones that aren’t useful to you. Do the same next week, and again the week after. By doing so, you’ll refine your list without expanding it indefinitely.

Mark keeps his Twitter account manageable by following no more than 250 (give or take a few) people, and he regularly deletes tweeters who become annoying or no longer useful. That gives him room to follow new tweeters who post interesting stuff.

Once you’ve set up Twitter to your liking, you’ll find ideas easier to come by.

Scrolling through his Twitter timeline one day a few years ago, Mark noticed a tweet from a group called Public Policy Polling (@ppppolis) announcing the results of its annual “News Trust Poll.” The tweet included a link to the poll results, and Mark studied the poll, chose a topic for his blog from among the polling data, and wrote a blog post titled “Older viewers distrust TV News—except Fox News.” Another time, he read a tweet from his hometown newspaper’s police log that a resident had called the police to complain about seeing a coyote in the neighborhood. Mark went back and read through the local paper’s police logs for the past month and discovered that citizens of his town (which borders the City of Boston on three sides) had called police to report seeing not only a coyote, but foxes. One man called police to tell them his wife and two children were “trapped” in the courtyard of their apartment building by three wild turkeys.

Mark wrote up a blog post about the media’s coverage of wild animals in the Boston suburbs.

To cast a wider net when you go fishing for ideas, try the two powerful blog search engines Google Blogs Search (www.google.com/blogsearch) and Technorati’s search (technorati.com).

Technorati, by the way, is the source on the Internet of pretty much everything you may want to know at any given time about which blogs are hot, which topics are hot on the blogs, and what’s being written on tens of thousands of blogs across the world.

Remember: if you do all that we suggested above, or even if you only do some of it, make sure to leave time for gathering string, collecting scraps of information or thoughts that can evolve into blog posts. You can do this by taking a walk (Jerry noticed that condoms are sold in dispensing machines outside most French pharmacies), by driving through town (he also noticed jarring speed bumps had been installed at the entrance of villages throughout the south of France to slow down drivers), or by sitting in a café (he did a photo blog on all who passed a Montpelier café in one hour). Or you can wander through the blogs you check, the news sites you read, the Twitter timelines you examine, and sometimes begin to see patterns before your competitors do. Both require a keen interest in what’s new and what’s changed.

Building an Audience

In Chapter 12, we will talk extensively and specifically about ways to build an audience for your blog and a “brand” for yourself and your work. For the purposes of this chapter, let’s talk about how you can manage just your blog and your writing to build an audience.

• Push out—but not too far—from the topic of your blog. It’s OK if you wander a little distance away from your blog topic from time to time. The reader will not only accept it, but will find it interesting. The reader, actually, may even be grateful for it. If your blog is about athletic shoes (and there is plenty of material for a daily blog on athletic shoes), a post now and then on shin splints in runners or the importance of good cleats on a football boot may draw new readers and still be useful to your current ones.
• Write well, and leave time to revise drafts before you post. This is our most emphatically obvious piece of advice. It’s like advising a basketball player to score more points to be successful. But if you read many blogs, even those published by major media organizations, you’ll see how often this advice is ignored. They’re filled with typos and punctuation errors. Never write directly into the “new post” window of your blogging software and hit “publish.” Serious writers do not publish their first drafts. Write a draft of your post in whatever word processing software you use. Put the URLs for the links you will use at the end of the paragraphs containing the link for easy access. Rewrite your post until you are satisfied with it, and only then copy and paste it (along with link, images, and whatever other media you have) into your blogging software. Then proofread, reading your writing aloud (it catches many more mistakes). Finally, check to make sure all your links work.
• Vary the lengths of your posts. There is nothing wrong with a 150-word post if that is all you need to say about something, and there is nothing wrong with a 1,500-word post if you research and write it well enough to keep the reader interested all the way through. Not every subject needs to be written about at length. Some blogging software (WordPress, for example) allows you to make a post out of a quote, or an audio file, or to post a “status”— a very brief sentence or two. Mixing up the length of your posts also makes your blog more visually appealing.
• Keep an “Ideas File.” As you read and as you go about your daily life, stray pieces of information, observations, images, and so on will cross your path, and the writer in you will think, “Hmm. Interesting. I might be able to get a blog post out of that.” Make a folder on your computer called “Blog Post Ideas” or “Stray Ideas.” (Mark calls his “Rogue Ideas;” Jerry, “Ideas File.”)
• Be patient. The Count of Flanders, a cleric in the court of Phillippe of Alsace in the twelfth century, wrote a small book of what he claimed were peasants’ proverbs. Rome ne s’est pas faite en un jour, wrote the Count: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s a hackneyed old expression indeed, but one that has lasted a millennium because it is true. The same is true of building a blog audience.

Christopher O’Leary, the blogger we met earlier in the chapter who has spent five years writing blog posts (more than 500 and still counting) about every song David Bowie has ever recorded, said his blog has “a slowly building readership.”

Who were his readers when he began the blog? “I don’t know,” he said. “Just people searching for songs or lyrics.”

Tom Ewing, a blogger in the United Kingdom (UK), has been working for years on a blog that reviews every UK No. 1 hit single, in order, starting with Al Martino’s 1952 smash “Here in My Heart” (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/).

Several years ago, Ewing discovered O’Leary’s blog and linked to it on his own blog. This brought it to the attention of the UK newspaper the Guardian and its website, which named O’Leary’s blog the “blog of the week” and wrote about it. Not long afterward, Time magazine singled out O’Leary’s work as one of its Best Blogs of 2011.

Now his blog draws as many as 1,500 readers a day, and his readership’s still growing. “Twitter was another big thing,” said O’Leary, whose Twitter account is @bowiesongs. “That’s brought me a lot of readers.”

“The readership has been good,” he said. “I’ve got a good group of commenters.”

His patience also earned him the knowledge and recognition needed to write a book.

Writing a Time-Limited Blog

Headed to Modena and Bologna in northern Italy for a couple of weeks to tour the Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati, Pagani, and Ducati factories and museums? Packing up for a summer music festival? Whetting your appetite for Restaurant Week in your city?

Write a time-limited blog. Not every blog needs to be kept going and kept fresh with new posts for months and years. Time-limited blogs—some last no longer than a few hours—have become a staple of journalism and communication.

Think of a news organization live-blogging the Oscars or a ballgame (the British news organization the Guardian is particularly good at informative and amusing live blogs). Think of a specialty publication publishing a blog for the duration of a trade show. Think of friends of yours blogging every day about their trips to Dubrovnik.

As you can see from the examples above, there are two kinds of time-limited blogs: live blogs, which can last from a few hours to a day, and short-term blogs, to which a blogger will post daily (and more) for at least a few days but less than, say, a month.

Here are some tips on writing both kinds of blogs:

• Conduct your background reporting and research well before you start the blog. You don’t want to be gathering background information on the fly. You want to have it ready to go when you begin your short-term blog. Gather facts, images, and whatever else you think will make your blog more informative, interesting, and fun. Keep that material in a word processing document and (for images and other multimedia) in a folder in your desktop for easy access.
• Announce when your live blog or short-term blog will begin on several platforms less than a week before it starts. Don’t announce your blog too far in advance. Readers forget. When you do announce your short-term blog on social media, make sure to include the day (and time, if it is a live blog) it will begin and the day it will end. That alerts readers to what time commitment they’ll need to keep up with your blog.
• Announce your short-term blog after you publish your first post, and make sure to include a link to the blog. The best places to announce the start of your blog are Twitter, Facebook, and, if you have one, another blog you are writing. Tweet about your blog— with a link—every day you are writing it. Nothing works better than Twitter to drive traffic to your blog.