I took advice from Janalyn Voigt for this post and decided to have her as a guest blogger. Janalyn writes adventures kissed by romance in the fantasy and historical fiction genres. DawnSinger, book one of her Tales of Faeraven Trilogy, will release with Port Yonder press in Fall 2011. She is an active member of ACFW and NCWA.
She is a writer on the following blogs:
Dawnslinger Book Video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYE5j-_2gJI]
Don’t Let Your Blog Eat You Alive
What’s a writer to do?
I returned home from a writers conference reciting, “Must. Start. Blog.” After all, it’s the thing to do, right? Right. As a writer, I need to network, build a platform, look like I’m doing something… Ahem. Well.
What they don’t tell you is that these little monsters require regular feeding. Content. That’s what they want. From you. Often.
I’ll admit that it took me awhile to corral that hungry little bugger and settle him into a regular reducing diet. You see, I hadn’t noticed how bloated he was getting. Some Facebook friends asked (begged) me to write this post since I admitted I’ve cut my blog monster down to size. So, for all those suffering in Blogland, here are 10 ways I tamed my, yes, three blog monsters.
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Decide your subject before you start. Don’t haver.
- Pick a subject you know something about so you won’t have a ton of research to do.
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Pick a subject you need to study for some aspect of your writing (perhaps part of your research).
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Why kill yourself to give people long posts they don’t really have time to read? Keep it short and sweet.
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Like housework, blogging expands to fill the time allotted to it. Rather than getting right down to it, tack it on at the end of your writing time.
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My method is to blog and attend to all blog emails and related blog business on one day only, in the afternoon when I’ve completed my writing for the day. That’s it. I don’t advertise my posts on this day but leave that for my promotion time, which I’ve set for a different afternoon.
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Schedule your blog posts to publish automatically. I don’t know how to do this in WordPress, but in Blogger you click on “Post Options” just below the window where you type your post. If you click “Scheduled at,” you can schedule a time and date. Then hit “Publish.” It will show up as “Scheduled.”
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If you don’t get all your blog posts done for the week but your time is up, skip the rest. Guaranteed, you’ll write faster next week. And if anyone complains, they need to get a life.
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Try to write clean so you don’t have to go back and edit much.
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Employ my favorite two little words: “Guest Blogger.”
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