Juiced On Writing

I am currently in the process of setting up a new blog for myself. This is the reason why I have not been around Juiced on Writing the last week or so. It takes time to setup a new blog, but once done, I should find time to move back to my more normal day. But in developing a new blog, I thought it beneficial (for me, anyway) to log my thoughts on the process itself. So, here it is – Part 1, at least.

The Background – Why a Blog?

Although I will remain writing on another blog from time to time, and this one, I have not found myself a home for the topics I want to blog about on my own Second Life. So, after some analysis, I’ve decided that you can’t keep a writer down when they want to write, so for the sake of myself, and myself only, I’ll open up a new blog to support my needs.

Juiced on Writing (this one) is built on WordPress, and hosted using the Hostgator ‘Baby’ contract. This contract effectively means I can open up as many new domains as I wish. Given I’m already experienced in using WordPress (and often hating it), then I will use the same blogging software going forward with this new project.

Setting this up also will give me a chance to put some of the learnings I have made previously on blogging to effect, including some (but not many) of the Blog Mastermind principles, a six month e-course program run by Yaro Starak, and a few others applied from the 30 Day Challenge, both of which I completed the last half of 2008.

I will document the start of this new blog for you here on Juiced on Writing, so that I may share some of my own thoughts, and some of the taught principles at work in creating a new blog. This, therefore is Part 1 of an intermittent series on creating a new blog using WordPress as the engine, but will also go into how to blog, and how to write content for a blog.

Step 1 : What to Blog About

Most people already have a good idea about what they would like to blog about. Unless, it seems, you’re a professional blogger or internet marketer, where the onus is on choosing a niche topic which will draw in readers, and potential funding or income with those readers. For those people finding a subniche without too many top ranking competitors already working the topic is where the action is at. For the rest of us – well, we blog, therefore we are, right?

Niche Topics and Money Making Keywords

Given that this will be a personal project initially, and may well be wound up reasonably quickly, the onus – for me – is not on creating a pro-blog or earning an income from my new blog. So I will not go into the many tools available to use to work out keywords and the potential of your various ideas to be a profitable niche topic. If you want some of this information, it is available in the free to join-up 30 Day Challenge, should another run from August this year.

One thing I would say is that there is no point choosing a topic that you are not passionate about. No matter what your initial enthusiasm on creating the blog, and putting up those initial posts, come two or maybe more weeks down the line, if you are not passionate about the topic – or at least finding out about the topic – then you will not be able to maintain the impetus to come up with content time and time again.

But do you need to come up with a topic which makes you money?

Or at least gets you read?

Blogging for Love, Not Money

There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, and hundreds of thousands of blogs don’t make any money. So, no, you don’t have to create a blog in order to make money, or even cover the costs of your hosting service. Or even the time spent writing, for that matter. We all know that most of those blogs are not being written to cover any kind of costs. They are being written simply for the love of it.

Whether you are setting up a new blog just because you can’t contain yourself from writing about a certain topic (editor sticks her hands up here) or do have the ambition to eventually make some money from the blog, there are many hosting and blog service options available to you, from the free (blogger.com) to the expensive pro blog services which offer various bandwidth and storage packages.

Still, Do a Bit of Research, Though.

Right, you’ve decided on a topic, or theme, and a potential package of host, and blogging service. Is it still okay to go ahead?

No. Not if you are basing this on love or passion. Even those passionate about a certain topic will quickly find their own passion draining if they appear to be talking about it unheard. Blogging (unless yours is kept private under lock and password key for a few elite family members, that is) is public. To blog therefore means to have a public audience.

An audience means at least the odd comment to keep you going, or one subscriber to your RSS feed offered. It means someone once listened to what you said, at least.

So, you have to have chosen a topic which may potentially give you a reader or two, to keep you going. How do you ensure this?

You do a little research, and answer a few questions for yourself:-

1. Are you about to blog on a topic which is already covered – and well, by hundreds of other bloggers? (Er, editor sticks her hand up but looks ashamed).
2. If you google some keywords on your topic, are there hundreds of thousands of matches, or none at all?

After being disheartened by your findings, but still having your heart telling you you want to blog about this, never-the-less (editor sticks her hand up again, at this point) there are ways around this. I can best guide you on this by giving you my own example, and how I thought this one out.

1. 1. I want to have an outlet for my own Second Life explorations. I would like to blog about them as I see fit.
   2. If you google the words, ‘Second Life Blog’ there are, on this date, 139,000,000 results. Yes, that’s 139 million. Seems like a good open market then, huh? Sigh.
   3. Those results should have put me off immediately. The fact that I have over 30 of them in my feed reader should have put me off also.
   4. After emailing several of those blogs which I thought might be interested in my own topics and themes, and would therefore welcome another writer on those existing blogs, I began to think otherwise. Blog owners weren’t picking up emails, or at least responding, and many of those 139M hits out there are dead-wood anyway, gone dormant several months if not years ago. So maybe there was some hope?
   5. To make any success out of it, though (the criteria being ‘finding at least one reader on occasion’ so that I didn’t end up feeling incredibly lonely and unfulfilled) I would have to find a slight sub-niche which wasn’t covered quite as numerically or well by those other blogs. I had to locate an untapped sub-niche. This called for even more analysis.
   6. I took a look at my 30 or so blogs which are highly read by some within Second Life. A quick analysis showed me what I had suspected – the majority of blogs on Second Life are ‘SL Fashion blogs’, dealing mainly with the latest trends in virtual clothing. Fashion blogging is a highly competitive and drama-prone field, with some mis-communications and ill-feelings between certain bloggers and the Second Life clothes designers being blogged about. Second Life is known for its drama and things kick off quickly between bloggers.
   7. The other blogs can be generalised into certain categories – the personal character-led blog, usually written by a true over-the-top avatar (normally a big woman avatar for some reason) which covers fashion pieces also, the topic themed blog (photography within Second Life, places in Second Life, sub-cultures such as Nekos, architecture, or all of the above) or there is a general opinions based blog along the lines of anti-fashion themes, picking out so-called fashion victims, or talking about second life trends in a satirical way. Of these, many are run by one person, or less than five or so, but with one predominant ‘voice’ or owner.
   8. The other type of blog is the group blog, often going under the name of a newspaper or as a complementary offering for an in-world magazine. Often these cover anything and everything from latest events, latest fashions or SIMs (places) to interviews with popular designers, or blatant opinion pieces. Sometimes these group blogs publish writer’s names, sometimes not. But Second Life is built on anonymity anyway, and people can create alternative avatars (alts) to hide their second life identities when blogging also.
   9. This (very) rudimentary analysis of the market didn’t give me much hope that a new blog on the block would ever pick up a readership, but then I wasn’t interested in blogging primarily in fashion, or in getting involved in opinion pieces based on the drama which often plays through Second Life (as with anywhere, given the amount of adults involved in something they can be very passionate about).
   10. After working out what I didn’t want to write about, the time came to work out specifically what I was wanting to write about. The list was rather large – fashion (when I felt like it), animals, my chicken experiment, certainly all the places I was exploring, events attended, and probably my occasional opinion on some of the topics effecting most SL residents, but without getting into a dissing match between plurkers or other bloggers, or being drawn into dramatics.
   11. Some of the other blogs, magazines and newspapers advertise for more writers on a regular basis. In fact, writers appear to be in short supply. I previously worked for one new blog on the block which advertised for writers on a second life community, but now wants only those which are prepared to be segregated into particular fields of writing. But the blog provides a starter list of possible topics to cover -
       - Fashion/Shopping
       - Interesting SL places
       - Reporting newsworthy events in SL
       - Dating & Sex in SL
       – SL Apartments & Homes
       – Events/Parties
       – Music/DJ’s
   12. I don’t (or can’t) write like that, on one topic, unfortunately. Although I could well write about fashion/shopping or interesting SL places on many occasions, what would I do with my own post I just had to do on some prefab homes I’d just stumbled upon? And what about the chickens, then?
   13. It became obvious to me at this point that my own second life writing needs were a little eccentric, but I might have stumbled upon a niche topic which had not been overly covered elsewhere, and was best placed in a personal character-led blog, if it were ever to meet some readership in the future.
   14. Was it worthwhile, though? With the statistics, that’s debatable, but only time will tell. But to give it the best chance possible to survive, I could at least make use of some internet marketing and specifically Second Life techniques to give it a fair start…(See Part II)

Look to the Future, Even When in the Planning Stages

1. Blog Upgrades

If you think there may be a potential in the future to try to monetize the blog, then consider your options wisely at the start. If using a free or cheap blog service, or one hosted on it’s own blog service servers.

• Is it either transferrable or upgradeable? Can you easily move content from your free or cheap service to an upgraded version, or elsewhere?
• Does the service you have chosen allow for full blog ownership? Can you add your own templates (blog designs) or at least a header image? Can you insert adverts, or graphics where you want to? Can you get statistics on how many page views you are getting? Can you insert widgets or external links / html where you need to?

2. Gaining Readers

A blog is no good if it’s just you, your keyboard, a published blog and no one to hear the tree falling down in the woods. You need to have somebody read you, least you fail to exist. To do this, you can put in some minor internet marketing techniques right into the planning stages, even before you go and buy that domain name (if setting up an entire blog on something like WordPress) or push the button to create that first blog post.

I will deal with some of these aspects in planning, in Part II of this series. In the meantime, I’ve just finally managed to get my new blog up and running, using a professional blog tech guru for the install, and his advice when encountering design problems with the themes I chose. Want to go have a look? You’ll see it in all it’s newborn glory at the link right at the bottom.

LinkMes:

The following websites were discussed in the above post, and may be beneficial to you -

• Hostgator – hosting (this is what I use, but there are many others).
• WordPress.org – download the latest WordPress software from here (self-hosted sites).
• WordPress.com – a hosted WordPress site on wordpress.com’s servers. This is free, but with some limitations to designing or changing some elements of your blog.
• Blogger.com – hosted (or you can self-host) blog service, which is free. Again, there are a few limitations to some elements you can change or insert for your blog.
• 30 Day Challenge – note this page is the front page for the 30DC of 2008. I don’t know the status of 2009, given that the challenge became a course later on in 2008.
• Blog Mastermind (this is not an affiliate link, although previously I have used one)
• Second Life
• The Chicken Diaries (my new blog)

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