Reading a few other blogs more regularly, I’m starting to get a sense of rules of engagement.
1. Don’t write every day. I can’t keep that going for now, because of the writing every day bit. But perhaps I should rephrase: don’t post every day.
Keep ’em coming? Let them think you’re not just churning it out? Not quite sure, but I’ve seen a few blogs that do post deliberately every second day, and it works. Enough that you’re satisfied, not so much that you take it for granted.
2. Have themes. Some have different themes for different days of the week – on occasion, with their own titles. Not sure whether I’m going there or not, on the titles. But I can see the point of it, when you’re interested in lots of different things, and want to give equal space to them.
So I’ve been thinking over what I would do as themes. Book reviews might be one – or book appreciations, to be more accurate. Reviews sounds like I’m trying to rate them, and be critical of them.
In fact, I’m more keen on the book-reader interaction. Not quite How This Book Changed My Life. But perhaps How I Loved This Book (And You Might Too, But I’m Not Going To Force You).
Given my huge love of children’s books, I could probably do a year’s worth of blog posts without much recourse to the library, but that could be overkill. Which would be a great shame, for something so special. So maybe alternating children’s picture books with others could work.
3. Add pictures. There I need to do some thinking. There are quite a few blogs which add loads of pics. They are generally personal pics, pics of family – and/or of products, if it’s that kind of lifestyle site. I like taking photos, but I need to think about putting them up as part of posts, particularly if I want to do more travel writing.
It’s also about appealing to different ways of looking at the world. I’m fairly wedded to the words version, as you can tell, but I recognise that others like pictures more. I’d like to win them over with my prose, given time, but if they’re not prose people, it’s not going to work so well. But a batch of pics, and THEN some prose – it might.
4. Add a bit more theming. This blog is a very simple one, in terms of look. And it has been for c. 6 years. Admittedly, I didn’t write on it for nearly 3 years, but if I want it to change, as the blog writing is changing, then a blog look and feel that works for the subject matter would be good.
That’s about as far as I want to go for now. There are blogs out there that are about making money for the writers, and maybe I’ll go there at some point.
But for now, it remains very much about the writing – with some extra tricks to make the writing stand out better.