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The Be a Better Blogger series of posts is almost finished. The series began with the post You are Invited: Share your Goals and Questions about being a better blogger. We asked you what you wanted to know, and boy, did you answer! Here's a wrap up of all the articles coming from the responses to the opening invitation to share.
Rita Arens wrote Why Do I Blog? A Writers Manifesto. She talked about being a writer, about writing, about the audience, and about the personal nature of blogging.
When I started Surrender, Dorothy four years ago, I wrote stories about my days. My days in those days were filled with baby poop, but they were also filled with self-discovery and new things I'd never done before. They were filled with exhaustion and love and amazement, and also humor. Babies are TOUCHING. People covered in excrement are FUNNY. Not realizing your co-workers are going to read your blog four years in the future is FREEING. The blog was mostly journaling. I didn't have categories. I just metaphorically vomited onto the keyboard several times a week and hit "publish."
As time went on, I started realizing what a great opportunity the blog was to work on other types of narrative nonfiction: political writing, more stand-alone personal essays, social issues and parenting theory. My blog also forced me to improve my skills with writing dialogue, which could come in handy if I ever try a screenplay. It's really hard to write dialogue, and recording actual conversations for the point of blogging them has taught me how people really talk. I find it much easier to write fictional dialogue now than I ever did before.
In Melanie Nelson's What Are Blog Metrics?, you learned that
Blog metrics are a way to measure the success (or at least the popularity) of a blog. In this article I will introduce you to several of the sites that are most popular for determining a blog's success: Google PageRank, Technorati, Digg, and Alexa.
Melanie Nelson also wrote the helpful article Choosing a Blogging Niche. Her advice included,
Finding your niche can be daunting at first because, truly, there are blogs in every niche. You are not going to be the first. However, if you look, you’ll see that there are holes to be filled. Find a need and fill that need. I started Blogging Basics 101 (at the urging of Shannon at Rocks In My Dryer) because there are many intermediate and advanced tech sites for bloggers, but there wasn’t a place for beginners. Blogging about blogging wasn't my first niche, either; it evolved from my first blog (a personal blog where I certainly didn't even consider a niche as part of my blogging plan) where I was receiving a lot of questions about how to do specific things with a blog (like crossing out words or adding things to a sidebar). Let that last part be a lesson too: You may start out with one thing and move to another. Sometimes the best-laid plans are just a stepping stone.
Should You Register Your Blog? again from Melanie Nelson explained several places where it is possible to register a blog, but went on to say,
In a conversation with other bloggers I was interested to find that few of my colleagues actually bother to register their blogs anywhere at all. Instead, they turn to social media to promote their blogs, using sites such as Facebook, Twitter, My Blog Log, etc. At the same time, I heard from the ladies that few of these sites (except Twitter) actually resulted in significant, long-lasting traffic.
I wrote a how-to type article called Changing your hosted Blogger blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog. This article gave step-by-step instructions for setting up the server, downloading the blog, and importing the content from the old blog.
Choosing Movable Type as Your Blogging Platform from Melanie was one in her series of posts about different blogging platforms. She gave the advantages and disadvantages of each. The other blogging platforms in her series included Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress.
My article How's your feed? Are you serving up full or partial feeds to your readers? explored the RSS feed question and brought out lively opinions on both sides of the full vs. partial issue.
There are two points of view regarding the full vs. partial feed decision. Some bloggers fear that a partial feed may lose readers for the blog. Many readers find
