Words on a page

You hear a lot about guest posting in the blogging world. Writing guest posts, as many will tell you, can help increase your visibility and the perception of your expertise. It could even make you a few dollars. But what if you’re a blog publisher?

As you may or may not know, I maintain two other blogs. One of them, which I run with my business partner, focuses on technical communication. A few weeks ago, the idea of approaching other tech comm bloggers to do posts for us entered my head and just wouldn’t leave.

So, I fired off an email to a handful of well-known bloggers in that niche inviting them to contribute posts to my company’s blog. The response was generally positive, to say the least. Of the people who responded (85% of them), most said yes. The rest said yes, but when they had the time. Two of the guest posts have already seen the light of the Web, and the response has been good.

Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about guest blogging, from the perspective of a blog publisher.

read more »

Over the next week or so, you’ll be noticing that the look of this blog is going to change. I’ll be cycling through several themes, trying to find one that I plan to stick with over the long term. But don’t be alarmed — the content in this space will be as it ever was. And I’ll be adding my regular posts.

If you have any opinions about a particular theme, leave a comment.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve chatted about this with a few writers whom I know and a couple of them have done just that. Mainly, they’ve glean inspiration for a blog post. One even got the basis for an article from an exchange on Twitter.

That hasn’t happened to me. At least, not yet. And I don’t know if it ever will. At least, as far as a full-blown article goes. I might pick up the seed of a blog post in something I read or write on a microblogging site. Then again, maybe I’m not using these sites as effectively as I should be …

So, my question for the fives of people who read this blog: if you post to a site like Twitter or identi.ca, have you gotten writing ideas either from your own posts or the posts of others? Feel free to leave a comment.

Feet of clay time, here. You might remember that I did a Twitter experiment a while back and subsequently swore off microblogging. We’ll that didn’t last too long. I’m back at it. A few reasons for this, but I won’t go into them right now.

Something I’ve been hearing, though, is the idea that microblogging can help make you a better writer. You have a 140 character limit (including spaces and punctuation), and need to pack as much information as you can into that small space. It can be done, and it can be done with some flair.

But for microblogging to help teach you to write more tightly, you have to concentrate. You have to think about what you’re writing and the words that you use. Which, in a way, defeats the spontaneity of microblogging.

That said, maybe you don’t need to go out and do some microblogging. Just keep one of the principles of microblogging — keep things short and interesting — in the front of your mind when writing. If you do that often enough it becomes a habit. And your writing will definitely be tighter.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

But I’m not saying that they’re good reasons … Let me explain:

Many of us have been told why every writer should have a blog. Obviously, I agree. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be writing in this space …

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been chatting about various things with a couple or three writers I know. When the subject of blogging came up (which it invariably did), everyone with whom I spoke had the following feelings about blogging:

1. They enjoy reading blogs, especially ones aimed at writers
2. They’d never take the plunge and start blogging themselves

The second bit caught me somewhat off guard. Here are people saying that they find blogs valuable, but aren’t willing to join the conversation. Fair enough, I thought after a few moments. When I asked why, the responses I got were interesting. The two main reasons were:

1. Blogging takes away time and ideas from my other writing
2. I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said

I definitely don’t agree with either response. Sure, blogging does take a bit of time. But if you create an editorial calendar, and block off 20 to 30 minutes a day then you can actually get a lot of blogging done. On top of that, you don’t have to post every day unless you really want to. Doing the deed two or three times a week is a great way to get your feet wet and build an audience.

As for ideas, chances are you won’t be blogging about the same things that you’re writing about for your paying gigs. That’s not to say you can’t. You can use the blog to develop those ideas, or to go off on a different tanget than (say) of an article.

To be honest, I can’t think of a writer whom I’ve met who doesn’t have something to say about something. Especially about writing. We all have ideas and opinions. Many of us have new and interesting and completely different takes on a subject from our peers. As someone once told me It doesn’t matter if something’s already been said. Say it again — someone might not have heard the first time. And a blog is a great way to put out that alternative view point, or to restate something from a fresh angle.

Thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.