How to Create a Successful Writing Blog

How to Create a Successful Writing Blog

It’s a no-brainer that writers need a presence on the web these days. Even the best selling authors have a place to showcase their work. Myspace and Facebook are two very good sites for developing writers to make it easy for people to access a writers work, but when it comes to writing on the web should a writer go with a blog or a website?

Blog. If you go with static content you can still use a blog, but the most beneficial thing about this tool is, of course, the ease of updating the content. With a few clicks it’s very easy to update your blog with new original content. The more you update and come up with original ideas, the easier it is to get placement in search engines, have people find and read your work, come to like how you write, and develop a relationship with you as a reader.

If you’ve read anything I write for this site you know that I can’t let an article go without a little advice. So… There are 2 types of writer’s blogs on the web right now. The first is the mind spilling “this is what I think and did today blog.” This blog covers all topics and doesn’t have any specific theme rhyme or reason other than to be about the author. This works fine, if you are already famous.

If you want good search engine placement you want to write on 1 (yes just 1) subject all the time. I know that’s hard to do, but 20 articles on a blog about science fiction writing will USUALLY bring you better placement than 100 generic posts mixed in with 20 sci fi articles. These search engines are sophisticated, but they have a 1 track mind. Find what people are asking for, and that is it. Do not speculate about what you think they want, but give them exactly what they ask for.

My suggestion (and again, I always have 1 I know) is that you create a blog that centers on your genre of writing. If you write Science Fiction, write about Sci Fi, watching Sci Fi on tv, your Sci Fi friends, your trip to the Sci Fi world where you bought a Sci Fi mug with some Sci Fi shaving cream and Sci Fi hair rollers and Sci Fi slippers. You get my point. The most important thing you can do is have a site where people can find you and your work when they are look for YOU. The second (and almost as important) thing you can do for yourself as a writer is develop a site where people find you when they are looking for writing like yours. This is very difficult to do, and you’ll only do it if you stay on topic. Also, grab all the links you can from others who like what you’ve written. It helps if they are on the same topic too.

Now that being said I know that writers like to write (well some do). They tend to want to have freedom and not be tied to one subject. It’s understandable. Okay, so have 2 websites. One where you are the writer who writes a journal/diary and tries to take the internet by storm by being witty and funny and of course well-written, and have the other website be about you as a writer and your work.

If you think of the web as a big brain, and you are the waiter trying to feed the big brain, you wouldn’t show the big brain pictures of your cutie cat named fluffy in order to make the big brain hungry. No, you would show it a picture of a cheeseburger over and over until it couldn’t resist it anymore.

I know what you are saying, “But other people are making a living off their blogs, and they talk about all kinds of stuff.” Yep. This is the point I’m making. Those people are bloggers not writers as such, pushing a certain product. They are just pushing themselves and their blog. Many times they don’t have any other product. You do. You have a book or some other publication. You can be a blogger and a writer, but to be both on the same site usually just makes a mess.

Every Writer

Richard Edwards has a BFA in Creative Writing and Journalism from Bowling Green State University and an M.S. in Education from the University of Akron. Managing editor of Drunk Duck, poetry editor for Prairie Margins, reporter for Miscellany, Akron Journal, Lorain Journal…check our About Us page for more. Also here is info on our On Classic Articles