5 Ways to be Better at Blogging

by Stephanie Morrill


Should all writers blog? Well, like they tell you in school, if a question contains a word like "always, never, all, or none," the answer is  likely, "No."

A writer emailed me requesting that I write a post on building a blog following. Which I took as a compliment, because it means I must look like I know what I'm doing...

I'm not convinced that I do, but I've been blogging for a few years now  - both successfully and unsuccessfully - so I'll share what I've learned.

The first blog I ever had was my author blog. I started it a couple months before Me, Just Different released, and the motivations were two-fold:

1. I wanted my publisher to see that I was doing something to promote my book.
2. I had been told that I should have one.

I was smart enough to know I needed to be consistent about posting, so I forced myself to blog 5 days a week every week. I was also smart enough to know that I needed a focus of some sorts ... but I could never come up with anything. So I talked about myself a lot - trips to Costco, diapers, etc. - and as a result, I had some extremely faithful readers: my mom, my husband, my mother-in-law, and my friends Roseanna and Kelli.

I knew that my blog was failing, but I didn't know what to do about it.

After about 8 months of struggling with my author blog, the idea for Go Teen Writers popped into my head. I decided to blog two days a week on Go Teen Writers and keep up my 5 days a week on my author blog. (A choice motivated more by pride than anything else.)

Go Teen Writers grew at a frustratingly slow pace. After about 6 months, it had 17 "followers" and Roseanna and Emii Krii were the only two who ever commented. After a year there were 40, and I was starting to recognize a few more names, like Rachelle, Tonya, and Jazmine.  I felt not only frustrated but drained. I was writing 7 blog posts every week, yet I couldn't seem to gain momentum.

If you blog simply for the joy of blogging then it's fine to blog about whatever you want, whenever you feel like it. But if you're wanting your blog to build your exposure, to grow your readership, here are some things I've learned in the last 4 years:

Blogs work when they serve others

Think about the blogs you read. Why did you start reading them? Why have you kept reading them? The two I'm most fond of are Pioneer Woman Cooks and the MacGregor Literary blog. (Which I read faithfully long before I became a client.)

I started reading Pioneer Woman because I love to cook and she has great recipes. So I went there to find great recipes.

I started reading MacGregor Literary's blog because Chip MacGregor shares good stuff about the publishing industry in an honest, funny way.

Those blogs served a need of mine ... and they've continued to serve with fresh, great content, which is why I keep going back. Consider what need your blog serves (or could serve) and why a stranger would start reading it.

You need a focus and a target audience

We've talked about this some as it relates to books, so I won't spend a ton of time here. It's easy to trick yourself into thinking the focus and target audience don't matter so much for a blog ... but they really do.

It's the reason why I don't talk to y'all about the new schedule I've whipped up for keeping my house clean. I'm very excited about the schedule, and I think it's really going to make a difference around our house ... but Go Teen Writers is a place for teen writer related topics. Wouldn't you have some serious, "Uh, what's going on...?" sensations if you showed up here tomorrow, and I had listed what days I scrub my toilets and how a cleaning schedule can improve your life as a stay at home parent?

Your focus and your target audience are a big part of your blog's uniqueness. While you could argue that I've cut a lot of potential readership by focusing on teen writers instead of writers in general, our focus is what makes the blog stand out.

Pick a schedule that's manageable

I said earlier that with my author blog, I felt like it had to be 5 days a week. With a 6 month old baby in the house and book deadlines to meet, that was rather aggressive. If I were doing it again, I probably would have started at 3 days a week. You want to pick something you can be consistent about ... but there is some kind of sweet spot with blogging so many times a week. Too many posts overwhelms readers and too few makes you forgettable. 

Give without expecting a return

You can't have an agenda of selling something - services, books, memberships, etc. - when you're blogging. It just doesn't work. You have to care more about your readers - much, much more - than you do about their dollars.

This is kind of a weird thing for me to try to explain, but I'll do my best. When I'm writing book proposals, Go Teen Writers is always in my marketing section. It gets counted as part of my platform. And I'm thankful for that, because it's nice to be able to put something in that section, as opposed to when I was first writing and my "platform" was based on the variety of writers organizations I pay to be a part of.

But even though Go Teen Writers gets listed in the marketing section, I don't approach the blog with, "How can I market myself here today? How can I make people want to buy my books?" It's nice, of course, when people like the blog and because of it buy my books, but that's not a motivation of mine when I'm creating content or interacting on the Facebook group. Does that make sense at all...?

If something isn't working - cut your losses and move on

When Go Teen Writers started to grow, I made the very difficult decision about ending my author blog. You would think it'd be an easy choice, seeing as Roseanna was basically the only one who left me comments, and coming up with posts 3 days a week was torture, but it was very hard on my pride to say, "This isn't working. And I'm going to admit that it's not working."

If you haven't already, install Google Analytics - it's free - and monitor your traffic. What posts do well? Which don't? I know well (too well) that the numbers can be depressing, but eventually I decided that it was better to know than to waste my energy pouring into something nobody read.

A great additional resource on blogging is from the MacGregor Literary blog. Awhile back, literary agent Amanda Luedeke posted about 7 Ways to Grow Your Blog's Readership and Blogging as a Fiction Author. I encourage you to read those as well for thoughts on how to title posts and format and all that other good stuff.

Anybody have questions I can attempt to answer? If you blog, what's something that's worked for you?