Blogging: Timing and Style for Starting Out

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This post follows the one on blog services cost. Timing and style are extremely useful factors in starting and maintaining a blog. Timing article posts, promotion, social network ties, promotion and background work is crucial. Style is also crucial in your image, reader bounce rates and the overall blog's caliber.

Timing for better blogging results and motivation

Timing is one of your driving factors when starting out a blog. The speed in the blogosphere is driven by the blog's audience. There is no delay between your article's posting and the reaction from the outside world. Your writing and editing speed is essentially the most crucial factor to take into account. The other factors, building a blog, content writing and editing, promotion, advertising, tagging... all the "stuff" it takes to put up the posts and drive people to them are secondary (and completely up to you.) If you put time and resources or hire someone to produce the blog you can get going in days. If you have resources or money to promote and advertise you can get people to notice your blog in hours. The same goes to your ability to promote your blog in other blogs, social tagging and networking sites. Timing also means how your blog relates to your readers and the rest of the industry (competitors, traditional media.) Some bloggers have made a name for themselves by quickly posting breaking news. Some bloggers write opinion and analysis articles, specially in politics, finance and international affairs. Opinion and debate blogs are also knows to keep a fast pace. In business and retail there are also blogs centered around breaking news. In consumer electronics and gadgets such as portable devices and communication services also break news quickly. In down times like weekends it is time to maintain, try new designs and perform background research and writing. With Web20's injection of vitality into our Internet use there is plenty of things to do: twitter announcements, FaceBook excerpts of posts, Linked-In group announcements. Tagging on Stumble-Upon, Digg and Technorati can also be done on off times. There is plenty of things to do in communicating your message to the world.

Blogging Style: Design, Writing and Content

Blog style is both the look and the content. Page design has always been a crucial element for on the web. The design itself conveys a certain message. Bloggers may need to test a few designs in order to attract and retain the relevant reader base. Content, both subject matter and writing style is also an element tied to the overall message. Business writing is very different from consumer product blogging. Take a look at the Cadbury Fair Trade blog. It runs on Type Pad just like Malcolm Gladwell's blog. Compare to the Medical Education Blog from the University of Saskatchewan. Each has a clear message which is designed and written completely differently. Blog style has evolved from a simple format to today's complex layout. Some blogs emulate a magazine or a newspaper column. For the most part a linear series of articles is the main section of a blog. A side column or two are used as static information like links and overall description. Advertising is usually at the side column as well.

Focus also on writing and editing style. Graphics are the first impression, writing style is what readers really come to see. Style you can define even if you are not going to write articles yourself. Writing style is more difficult to design than graphics. Here you can use examples with your comments. If you read a blog or a newspaper site regularly you know exactly what style they use. In every field there is one basic style. You can adopt this style in the beginning or even design your own style (less formal, etc.) Blogs for some meant informal or personal style. Like a conversation between two people. There is also the style from newspapers which is more editorial and factual. Corporate blogs started out either as informal writing by engineers and business managers or as press releases. There are two very different styles. Some of the bigger blogs like O'Reilly's Radar have many writers and each has his own style. If someone is going to write for you, make their style fit your needs. Editorial style is the type of content, subjects, opinion and views. Editorial style is what leading magazines do well. Women's fashion magazines are based on editorial style. Blogs use this idea .

I encourage bloggers to start out with a simple design and write a few articles. The page layout need to conform to the posts, images and other components like link widgets and components for tagging and networking. A series of articles will also give you a good idea how a page looks and how to format the posts. Some bloggers like the first page to show only the first paragraph in the post, this is done with the ‹!--more--› tag. The "more" tag enables you to show just a part of the article on the first page. This is just one style idea that depends on your needs (you may even want to test this with readers.) As you learn more, all the components of a blog's page will start making sense. It can get complicated if you are not organized. Blogs are the "simple Simon" cousins to web sites, make sure you don't forget.

To get started quickly, have a designer or a blogger set up a free blog on Blogger.com, TypePad.com or WordPress.com. Then you can see exactly how the page lays out and how posts look. You can change templates from the available free ones. You can also install templates from the available free ones. The design can be a collaboration between you and a designer. You can look at templates get ideas and the designer can test them out for you. Once you try a few layouts the first one should pop out for you and you can add a few posts. Some say that "style is everything." To some, it's adopting an available design, like seeing a model kitchen. To some it is in their head, they can sketch it on paper: they just need someone to put it together. To some it evolves, moves with time, the first time out is just a start. Do what works for you and     G O O D     L U C K !