A blog a day keeps the doctor away

Blogging. Everyone’s at it. Celebrities, multinationals, academics, even your little sister. Blogs can be a great way to publish your work and opinions in exchange for objective feedback from the friendly inhabitants of the blogosphere. Here are a few tips on how to survive the domain of the domains.

The first thing you should do is choose your platform wisely. All blog sites offer something a bit different. No one is going to take you seriously if you start waxing philosophical on Tumblr. However, if you want to reblog a plethora of hilarious GIFs, welcome home! If you just want to get what you want to say out there, your go-to platforms are WordPress and Blogger. They look snazzy, they’re straightforward… could you want anymore?

At university, it sometimes feels like there isn’t enough time to meet those pesky deadlines, eat, and well, exist, never mind being an online personality. Set yourself targets of how often you will blog and fit in posting around your free time. If you spend a few sneaky hours in the evening perusing Netflix – be productive and blog while you watch. Scribble ideas down on the bus. Create a note on your phone while you’re having lunch – there’s no time like the present!

One of the biggest obstacles to being the crème de la crème of bloggers is a lack of inspiration. When you start blogging, you’ll have reams of great post ideas. Your first instinct is to get all your Nobel Prize winning thoughts on the internet for all to see. This is a rookie mistake! You’ll soon run dry of ideas, and a whimsical tumbleweed will roll across your URL after a few weeks. When you’re animated about a subject, your first instinct is to talk about it. Go for it, but save the posts as drafts and publish them periodically to keep your followers engaged.

Speaking of followers – you want people other than your Mum to read your blog, right? Most blogging platforms allow you to link your blog to your Facebook, Twitter and all that jazz. Do it! The more the merrier, as they say.

Another way to lure people in is through tagging your posts. “Tags” are words your post is associated with when people search the tags via a search engine. Say you wrote a post about the Galapagos Islands and tagged it with “Pacific Ocean”, people searching “Pacific Ocean” would see your post in their search results. Tag your post with everything you can possibly think of which is somewhat loosely related. More people will be linked to your posts, meaning more blog hits!

It may sound elementary, but follow other people’s blogs. Bloggers are much more likely to read your blog if they can see you have mutual interests, as many people like to follow back out of unspoken internet courtesy. Plus, reading other people’s blogs can be a huge help when it comes to thinking of new post ideas.

Most importantly, make your blog your own. You can talk about pretty much anything with the guarantee someone else in the realm of the internet will agree with you or find it interesting. If you didn’t enjoy writing about it, the chances are people aren’t going to enjoy reading it.

Finally, a tip for blogging (and for life): organisation is key. Check your blog regularly or you may miss out on something promising. Blogs are a great hub for debate, responses may spark inspiration for further posts, and people may even reference your post.Keep it entertaining, post frequently and be diligent; you shan’t fail. Happy blogging!