Take Your Blog to a New Level

 There are lots of different reasons to maintain a blog. The creators of the application pictured it as an early type of social media — an online diary that could be shared with family and close friends. They never actually envisioned it being used as a mass medium and a source of journalistic writing.

Since we are here to use the blogging format for journalistic purposes, the trick is to move away from the personal and toward the professional. Jim Stoval and the University of Tennessee has a good post on his website on how to do just that: Stovall on blogging

Here are Stovall's six key points:

A weblog should be about something, not about you. Weblogs began as personal, online diaries, and many of them still are that. Those with the most readership, however, deemphasize the personal stuff and concentrate on a topic, issue or subject area.

As yourself: What am I interested in enough to write about it a lot? What is your passion? Chance are, whatever it is, other people have that same passion. If you can give them good, interesting information that is well written, you are on your way to building an audience.

Act like a reporter; write like a journalist. If a weblog simply presents your opinion about something, well, so what? But if you give people information – that is, if you act like a reporter and do your own research – you are going to have something that no one else has. And the writing needs to be good – clear, straightforward, precise. You can develop a style that you are comfortable with as long as that style doesn’t waste the time of your reader. Readers are not going to stick with you if you are self-indulgent or inefficient in your writing.

Include lots of links. Take a look at Instapundit.com, one of the pioneer blogs on the Web. Glenn Reynolds, the guy who created Instapundit, writes in short snippets and usually links to something else he has seen or read. He shows his thousands of readers what’s interesting. They may then go to another web site, but they will be back. (Prof. Smith adds: That is the classic function of a filter post — see post about that down below.)

Get to be an expert on your topic. Yes, you can do that even if you’re just a high school student. Do lots and reading and research. Interview people who know a lot about your topic and then write about them and what they are doing and what they know. You, too, will begin to accumulate a lot of knowledge.

Learn to go beyond your blog. There are lots of web sites that would like to consider posting what you have written. Sometimes you can get your stuff posted simply by signing up to become a member of the site. Pursue those opportunities. The more that you spread yourself out, the more like you are to build a good audience.