There’s plenty of ‘how to blog effectively’ articles out there, and you may be wondering, “Why should I take advice from someone who has ~300 followers?”
The reason I think you should care is that I feel those 300 followers is about average, perhaps a little more or less, to what you should expect after blogging in the writing community for about a year (which is where I am) with absolutely 0 online presence beforehand.
The main way to succeed at blogging is to not give up. You may never get paid for it, and you may never get famous, but you will still gain from the experience. Here’s how.
What Blogging Can (Will) Get You
You can easily get articles about ‘how to direct traffic to your blog’ or stories about how people succeeded. Some of that crap works, but in real life? This Bo Burnham quote sums up my thoughts on most of that advice:
I would say don’t take advice from people like me who have gotten very lucky, we’re biased. You know, like Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you, ‘Liquidize your assets, buy Powerball tickets, it works!’
— Bo Burnham on TBS’s Conan, 2016
The same can apply to advice from successful bloggers or, gasp, authors. Sure, they put in the effort, they had skill, and they did what was necessary to start the process, but an element of luck plays into all of it. None of us are failures when luck or zeitgeist didn’t fall our way.
What you can really expect is to contact a few other dedicated bloggers or, in my case, author-bloggers. You can expect to see more of what other people do, recognize what choices you have and what steps you need to take if you do want to chase a dream like publishing – either traditional or self-published.
What You Must Pay
While I believe having more than the free plan would help me grow my blog, direct monetary loss isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about payments of effort. Time is something even free bloggers have to spend.
When it comes to your own posts, you’ll figure out your balance of quality vs. quantity. I decided to post every day for 3 months in 2018, and that was definitely when I got through the beginning slump – but posting every day isn’t necessary. What is necessary, if you want to keep growing, is to just not quit. Keep commenting and reading even if you post once a week or once every 2 weeks.
This leads me into the other ‘payment’ – comments. Likes are penny candy after a while, and you can’t be sure some of those people even read your stuff. Try using the wp reader for a while – it’s way easier to like than it is to go to the website, load it, read it, then like it. So yes, like, but also comment – comment like you think the poster is about to quit and you’re the only one who can prevent it. Even if they don’t care about you in return, you did a good thing. Start a conversation, be the reader you want other people to be. Don’t depend on getting secret readers or stuff like that.
Eventually, commenting won’t feel so nerve-wracking. You’ll just do it. Right now I have a hard time commenting on popular blogs because I feel like I can’t add to an already illustrious conversation – but that’s not true, and I can get over that psychological block.
Also, don’t be an asshat in the comments.
Have a Good Time
Warning: atypical advice ahead!
If you don’t enjoy blogging, don’t do it. It’s that simple. The chances of getting internet fame or causing your book sales to skyrocket are low, especially after a short time online. If you don’t enjoy the platform, try posting less often. Try finding a type of post you like better. Maybe try Twitter (which makes me a nervous wreck, but you can find me @hrrgorman) or Tumblr or Instagram.
If you don’t like blogging, you’ll require more comments, likes, and traffic to feel worthwhile. You might get them – it is possible – but that’s still got a lot of luck basis. If you don’t like blogging, really consider what your ‘final straw’ is. Don’t let online bs drag you down in real life. Have reasonable (aka low) expectations if you are a stat dependent creature.
Do you have any tips for beginning bloggers? Any questions about startup, fears about where your blog is going? I’d love to have a chat in the comments, so meet me there!
In 2 weeks, I hope you’ll enjoy my post about writing prompts and how they are super useful to worm yourself into the writing community on WordPress! Give me a follow if you’re interested!
I of course enjoy the mega hit Take Me Out, but Dark of the Matinee has a crazy catchy tune. It’s also insanely British, and I enjoy it a lot. I also like the band name because it reminds me of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
This is a deep cut from an album that came out while I was in college. I think it’s gives me a breath of nostalgia, reminds me of when I got the album. One of my friends had discovered the band and suggested it to me.
I like a lot of Biddu songs, and this one fits my usual desires quite nicely. This instrumental feels egregiously 70’s, and I still don’t know how this song is supposed to make me think of the Summer of ’42. I think it may have appeared in a movie about a guy who was going to college during the war, but I’ve never seen it and don’t really care to look for it.
You might already have some feelings about slate. It is a left-of center news and information group, and I can confirm that the bias is real. I was skeptical of this show at first because of Slate’s obvious reporting bias. But Slow Burn? Goddamn. Holy crap. It’s absolutely fantastic.
I first heard this song when my father in law decided he needed to impart a large hoard of songs he’d ripped from various sources (apparently he found someone who could rip vinyl – imagine that setup!). I rather like my father in law, and our music tastes overlap very well in the early 70’s range (he enjoys more late 60’s and I enjoy more late 70’s).
I think this is a deep cut from a strange album and not a single at all. It’s kind of dreamy, synthpop type stuff. The band is a little bit obscure.
A few years back I decided to listen to the top 100 songs from each year of the 70’s. This showed up in ’71, and my eyes widened. It could just as well have been Matchbox 20, or perhaps something from the 90’s. I’ve actually tricked people that this song is newer than it really is.
Recently, I’d found an amazing band called the Amorettes. They had a great Classic Rock feel despite being brilliantly new. I liked the band because they had a sound somewhere between Heart and Molly Hatchet.
Kris Lynn apparently is a fellow Carolinian and went through Florence! I was kind of excited to see that I had a partner in crime (though I didn’t get to loot nearly as much as planned…). I’m glad they’re ok, and I’m glad I’m ok! Whew, close call there.
So, here’s a pro tip: start reading this at part 1.:format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1163400-1394180473-3330.jpeg.jpg)
I listen to a classic pop (is that a thing?) station where I live. On Saturdays when the station owners can’t be bothered to pay for a DJ, they instead do classic presentations of Kasey Kasem’s top 40 shows. On the first weekend in September, they chose one from 1983, and this song was high on that list.
This song is totally underrated. Sure, it sold well and is famous and everything, but I still really like it. It has such a strong melody.
I started playing Fallout 4 in my spare time. While doing so, I realized that the collection of instrumentals on the soundtrack is sadly lacking. This little doozy from the Fallout 3 score is one of my favorites. I love the slightly different instrumentation it uses from a lot of the other songs on the soundtrack. The Gerhard Trede songs are also fun.
I personally believe the Beatles are super overrated. They’re not bad, and I can listen to some Beatles pretty easily, but so many people rave about what I find to be otherwise unoriginal, extremely ‘ok’ songs. The Beach Boys are far better, in my opinion. So are the Grass Roots.
If you’ve followed my blog for long, you’ll know that one of my political heroes is John McCain. On Friday, news came out that he was no longer accepting medical treatment, and about an hour before I set to writing this news had announced his death.
I love some Molly Hatchet. It’s southern rock at its finest, complete with complex riffs and a bit of a swampy feel. The band is named after a roadside legend about a Southern prostitute who murdered men with a hatchet, and I think that matches perfectly with some of my goals this month.
I think Mongolian throat singing is entirely underrated, and this band is absolutely amazing. If you’ve never tried Mongolian music before, give the YouTube link a click and listen to this thing. The Altai Band is extremely skilled at their craft, and I haven’t yet found a better Mongolian throat singing example that would appeal to a western Ear.
I’m just stuck on this song. No other reason to put this here. It doesn’t inspire me or even jive with my usual tastes.
This song first came up on my YouTube mymix for whatever the hell reason Youtube thought I’d like it.
Instrumental disco is my go-to when I need background music, and A Fifth of Beethoven has a special nook. That special ‘boop’ sound when the electric organ is starting the main riff is excruciatingly annoying and much louder than the rest of the song. It grates against the soul in such a way that it clears a room for those who cannot acclimatize to its ilk.
One of the first albums to go quadruple platinum, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida is a 17-minute showdown of people who were certainly high as kites when they made it. It has this slight horror element to the sound, something visceral and ancient (and I’m not just saying this because it’s old music).
This one is really weird and has a bit of a sad undertone. I like to edit stories set in space, like the 
I first heard this song when I was in middle school, but it has very little singing and no recognizable words. As a result, I didn’t find this song again until much later when it randomly came up on my Youtube mix. I instantly stood up and proclaimed to my coworkers that I had found it, that this was the song I’d been searching for since I was 12.
My villains are often my favorite characters. I imagined “Belly of the Beast” as the theme song for my favorite villain, Patricia Schroeder, in a series of books that will likely never see the light of day. She was just freaking evil, and her motivations were still somehow strangely pure. The song has such a good horror backdrop, and it’s still good metal. It’s one of those few pieces of music that I used to get into a character’s head.