If you’ve just been to the LIVE Guild Conference, I’ll bet you’ve been told you need to blog. Just last year, after coming home inspired, I felt a renewed sense of the importance of blogging. Here are some observations and tips that have helped me make a much more serious commitment to my blogs in this past year.

Why Is Everyone Blogging?

We blog because we want to increase the numbers of people who know our name. Our ‘platform’ of all those who might buy books as we publish them needs our help to grow. We need the regular discipline of writing. We need a place to make our thoughts available for anyone who might benefit from, or resonate with them. We blog to place our own thoughts into a form where they can be cross-referenced by tags, searched, linked, and forwarded conveniently when the mood to share strikes us. We blog to showcase our writing ability (especially if we don’t yet have clips to show potential publishers).

We blog to create small communities within the vast realm of cyberspace. Some of us blog to share specialized knowledge, to evangelize and practice apologetics, to honor saints, to help promote the work of Catholic writers and artists, and to prove we are reliable columnists (in case a paying job ever opens!). Blogging has about it the feel of the informal essay, which G.K. Chesterton lauds as a form through which we play with ideas and exercise our unique voices. We blog because our mentors tell us it is The Thing To Do.

With Sarah Reinhard walking you through Blogging 101, it’s simple to Get Started Blogging! Don’t be scared!

Kathryn Cunningham has thought a lot about reasons to blog.

Tips for the Blogging Life

There’s ‘writing a post’ and then there’s a good bit of other stuff that goes into the blogging life. I’ve found that the ‘life’ is harder to adjust to than the actual writing. It’s difficult to keep up with a regular posting schedule, and I’ve had to adjust my expectations accordingly. Better to post properly what you intend and plan to post than haphazardly chip away at an impossible posting schedule. I’m trying to honor this ‘part time job’ with as much attention as if I still were a columnist with an editor’s deadline to attend to. The difference is that I’m now the editor, and I squirm under my own thumb!

Jennifer Fitz will help you Find Time for Blogging in the midst of a busy life, and Sarah Reinhard knows how it feels when real life ‘gets in the way‘ of blogging.

I’ve finally found a reliable way to archive all posts. Yes, I know they all exist on my blog site, but I still have not been reliably backing that up, and there’s too much at stake to risk losing them all if my server/host doesn’t backup properly just before a crash someday. Now I’ve got a freebie Evernote account, and I simply clip each post to an Evernote folder as it is published. It’s much easier to look through the whole shebang there instead of scrolling a long list of posts at the blog itself. Why do I want this archive? I don’t want to duplicate material. I want to cross-link material better in the near future. I want to be able to access related material if I write elsewhere about a topic. And, as I said, I don’t want to lose all of it if my server crashes. I could set up an automatic if-new-post-then-evernote-clip via IFTTT, but I’m not much of a techie.

It has improved my workflow immensely to consider ‘writing’ and ‘typing/posting’ two different tasks (you might even want to consider them three tasks). There are many times I have time or energy for one and not the other. I’m still a write-by-hand kind of girl, and find my authentic voice gets too clipped if I try to write at the computer. When the schedule says, “Blogging,” I can turn to a file with notes to be written up into posts, or to one with posts to-be-typed and get busy.

I also prepared a posting schedule with the sole intention of getting ahead of it. It seemed that blog tasks never gave me a feeling of accomplishment and closure. Now, I have a schedule for one quarter, and if I can get ahead and pre-post it, whatever time I gain is gravy for other projects. This is my bare-bones, must-do skeleton schedule, and so I can always post for fun during the quarter on off days, if I like. I do better at playing with time management than whipping myself into shape.

What’s New in Blogging?

Well, whatever I learn today, you’ll perhaps have been doing all along, but here are some new things I want to try this year.

Series Posts – Same theme, several posts, linked… sounds easy if just the right topic comes to mind. Sarah’s Blogging 101 is a pertinent example!

Sneeze Pages – One post that recalls and links several others by theme, time period, or some other commonality. This post is an example. Another would be a monthly recap of your most popular posts.

Transcription Software – I want to try Dragon Speak and see if it works. Anyone out there know?

Improve your blog with Sarah’s advice. You can’t do everything, but pick a couple of new things now and then to try, and you’ll develop your own ‘best practices’ as you go. Here are 10 Ways to Refresh Your Blog

How Do You Learn to Blog?

Right here, at the Guild, you have access to a good bit of blogging advice. Search for ‘blogging,’ or ‘Sarah Reinhard’! Then there’s Copyblogger and ProBlogger for your ongoing education. You must ask questions, if you have any, and, finally, Just Do It! If I can, anybody can! Do you realize that I’d have been voted ‘least likely to blog’ in a 2012 Conference Yearbook, if we’d had one?!?! Don’t let (as I was sorely tempted to do) the technology overwhelm you. It’s really still just writing, writing, writing, which you know how to do!

Study blogs you love, Guild Member blogs, blogs on your topics, and blogs about blogging!

Read Brandon Vogt’s book, The Church and New Media

What About Promoting My Blog?

Once a month, you can send me a link to your favorite post of the month, and I’ll add it to my first-Wednesday Member Round-Up right here (send to charoster ‘at’ yahoo ‘dot’ com). New Evangelists Monthly is a similar round-up. You can link your Facebook page to your blog, for automatically placing each post there, or ‘like’ each one manually as it is published. You can place your posts on relevant Linked In groups announcements. You can link each post at Catholic Bloggers Network. Some people pin their posts on Pinterest. Subscribe to your own blog so it comes in as an email. Then you’ll think of a few people who might like to see just that post, though they are not regular subscribers. Make your blog a hot link in your email signature. Include it in all your online profiles. If you review a book, email that post to the author with a personal note. And of course, be sure you are listed in the Member blog roll here at CWG!

Here are Ways to Improve Your Blogging Statistics, and Sarah Reinhard will show you how to promote your blog with Facebook and Twitter.