A Few Questions About Blogging
A couple of weeks ago, a podcast called The Art of the Business dropped us an e-mail and asked if we would like to chat about blogging on their podcast. I sent them a copy of Blogging For Dummies to review and they read the entire thing in less than a week. They also sent us some pre-podcast questions and I thought I share my responses.
What use could a blog be to my artistic practice?
In terms of an artistic practice, the most use a blog can provide is the ability to get noticed. Anyone who has run a blog for more than a few months can tell you that blogs are hit by search engines more often than static web sites. Blogs have more relevant content and, since they are updated regularly, engines come back more often to catalog the new postings. There are also tools within most blog software that allow you submit your new posts automatically to search companies. Over time your site will appear more often in search results over a site that hasn’t changed very much.
What are some basic elements I should include in my blog?
To me, the most basic elements for a blog are:
- Comments
- Archives
- Search
- Responding to your audience.
How often should I post on my blog?
If you’re serious about the success of a blog, you should blog once a day. If you have more than one writer, you should blog a few times a day. This way, you will always provide content for your readers to check out and keep them coming back. But don’t forget that any content you’re posting is of a certain level of quality. Don’t just post things about your pets, breakfast, or what you did last night. If you’re an artist, your product is who you are an an artist. Talk about the artistic portion of your day. What kinds of things are you doing to build your art. Your blog can be only as successful as you are at being creative in starting and maintaining conversations.
What are some ways to drive traffic to my blog?
There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to a blog but, I think there are really two powerful ways that drive the most traffic: awesome content and being active in the blogging community. When I talk about “awesome content” what I really mean is relevant content. If the blog is a personal blog, make sure you’re talking about yourself. Share your interests and be honest with the audience you build around your site. People will come for the honesty and stay for the cool stuff that you’re doing. If the blog is about your business, make sure it stays that way. Chat about business and anything related to the business you’re conducting. As for being active in the blogging community, you’ll want to make sure that you’re reading blogs and leaving comments on what you read. Meet up with blog writers in your area and find those with similar interests as yourselves. If your blog is about business make sure that you are reading blogs in the same industry as your company. It is a great way to make connections and keep up on what is going on with your competitors, partners, and other similar industries.
Do you have some recommendations for artist’s blogs?
I think the most important aspect of being an artist is showing people what it is that you do. If you’re a painter, you may want to consider something similar to a photo blog. A lot of photographers post a weekly or daily photo on their blog. It may be a good way to post examples of painting that one does. If the artist is an actor, perhaps a video blog would work better. Examples of famous scenes or example of past work and adding video posts to your blog. Musicians would want to post audio. There are many ways to express your art online - doing what you are comfortable with is the best way to go.
What other things do you think we should cover when we do the podcast? Any topics we should make sure to touch on? Drop your ideas in the comments and we’ll make sure to chat a bit about them. We’re still working out the details about when to do the interview but when it is “in the can” we’ll post a link.
Dove reaches out to bloggers with chocolate
I have only one problem with the recent blogger outreach marketing campaign put together by Matchstick for Dove, and that is the idea that the boxload of chocolate they sent you is supposed to be shared with your friends and family. This chocolate is really good. My instinct, frankly, is to hoard it all for myself.
Nonetheless, I did go ahead and share it, and the results were pretty unanimous. Most of my friends and family really liked it, from the packaging to the flavor. Dove has always been one of my favorite chocolates, infinitely superior to most of the chocolate available in grocery stores (which is where I usually gave in and bought chocolate, frankly). So when a friend forwarded me a link to a blogger outreach program that promised me FREE chocolate in exchange for being contacted a few times by Dove/Matchstick, I was thrilled. The program, which I was also interested in—there is a whole chapter on how to market successfully in the blogosphere in my book “Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies” --did everything right. There was no requirement to blog about the chocolate, although clearly the folks running the campaign hoped the bloggers who got chocolate would do so. In fact, the information sheet that came with the chocolate urged the participating bloggers to “let your friends know how and why Matchstick has made you a part of this program and what your involvement is.So high marks to the chocolate, and high marks to Matchstick.
The “Dove Pleasure Kit” arrived with about 18 small packets of chocolate, each containing four pieces. I believe the person who interviewed me for the program called these “purse packs” and these were the easiest to give away to friends. There were also four full bars of chocolate, and three packages containing individually wrapped pieces. For good measure, the kit also contained a Dove journal (for your scintillating thoughts on chocolate, perhaps), a “foot pampering” kit, a wine glass, and the whole thing was packed in a tote bag. Just as the sayings on the inside of the individual chocolate pieces are, the whole kit/program was target to a female audience. I had never previously considered exfoliating my feet while drinking wine and eating chocolate, but anything for science, right? You can see photos of the entire kit here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/supersusie/tags/dove/
There were four kinds of chocolate in the kit: Milk, Dark, Dusk, and 71% Cocoa. My favorite, by far, was the new flavor, “Dusk” which is a mix of milk and dark chocolate. The overall flavor is deeper than milk chocolate, less cloying sweet, but without any of the dryness or even bitterness that dark chocolate has. Oddly enough, although I usually prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, I liked Dove’s milk chocolate better than the dark. Perhaps just on the edge of being too sweet, it was better “in the mouth” that the dark chocolate, which didn’t melt as nicely and seemed a tad waxy. My least favorite was the 71% Cocoa, though this didn’t surprise me—I haven’t liked much of the cocoa bars I’ve tried, regardless of brand.
So, my thanks to Dove for the chocolate. I highly recommend it!
How much should you share online?
Emily Gould has written a lengthy piece for the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine about her time as a writer for the gossip blog Gawker. The piece, titled ”Exposed” is something of an exploration of how far you can go with sharing your private life on a blog, and the lives of others.
In it, Gould says:
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible.
I’m often asked about privacy concerns when it comes to blogging. Many people describe privacy concerns as a generational thing and generalize broadly to say that younger people are happy putting up pictures of themselves and those in their lives on Facebook, or posting their thoughts about sex, relationships, and jobs in their personal blogs; older people aren’t. It really isn’t that simple, however, and like Gould has done, sometimes you may find out what your own comfort limits are only by crossing them.
For me, the guideline is this: I will put online—in any online space, regardless of password protection or site membership requirements—information I would feel comfortable sharing with a friendly stranger I speak to on the street. Would I be willing to show someone like that the photos I had taken for publicity purposes? Of course, and I’m also happy for that person to get a glimpse into my interest in knitting, travels, and life via the photos I share on Flickr. Am I OK with sharing my professional background and experience online? Yep, and I do that on LinkedIn. How about Facebook? That social networking site has spaces for me to tell people about my interests, relationship status, and the books I’m reading, and yes, I’m happy for pretty much anyone to have access to that stuff. By most standards I’m pretty open. What I don’t share online—anywhere online—are the private details of my life. The things I might share with one or two close friends in conversation, or that I might perhaps only tell my husband. (That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Well, lots of people share everything.) I don’t blog about my friends much at all, their trips, travails, employers, and so on—even if that information seems innocuous, it isn’t my information to share. I don’t blog about my health, I rarely blog about my politics, and I never, on any site, use information that could be used for identity theft, like my date of birth, government identification numbers, and so on. For 10 years, this wavy line in the sand has worked for me, at least so far as I know.
So I’m curious, where do you draw the line? And why do you draw it where you do?
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