Last week, you learned how to create a blog and a few pointers for writing a blog post. Today’s article will finish up the three-post Creative Blog series with some valuable blogging tips! These tips will help you to attract and maintain an interested audience, and ensure your blog continues to thrive.
1. Post Consistently
The most important of all the blogging tips offered today is post consistently! You can think of your blog as a magazine or a subscription service. Would you read or subscribe to a magazine that has a random number of publications per year, or is delivered on random dates? Wonky release dates would absolutely affect your experience with any subscription service! You can post consistently by choosing specific dates to publish your posts. You can post once or twice a week, or even daily; whatever works for you! Just make sure that once you decide on dates, you stick to your schedule!
Your publishing schedule isn’t set in stone: as you gain a following, you will find a publishing schedule that works best for you and your readers. For example, I publish on Tuesdays and Fridays so that people can try my tutorials after work during the week and at home during the weekend. Publishing daily isn’t an option for me; I couldn’t write such detailed tutorials nor give my readers time to try them out! Regardless of your posting schedule, you’ll definitely want to use a newsletter service such as MailChimp to give readers the option of receiving posts in their inbox.
2. Explore Topics
Once you pick a niche, you should more or less stick to it. That niche, however, should not constrain your creativity. It’s good to experiment with topics that are somewhat or distantly related to your niche! Take this Creative Blogging series, for example: it’s outside of the usual TPK theme (art and calligraphy), but it’s related enough to be interesting!
In Six Steps to Starting a Creative Blog, we explored a knitting theme in Step 2. Some exploratory knitting-related topics might be:
- Things You Can Knit with Besides Knitting Needles
- Celebrities Spotted Wearing Knitted Goods
- Knitting Techniques Across Different Cultures
- Why Knitting is Therapeutic
All of these topics aren’t directly related to learning how to knit, but they should prove interesting to any of the potential or current knitters who come across your blog!
3. Consistently Post on Social Media
Posting on social media significantly increases the likelihood of readers finding your blog. If you post on social media every day (or 5-6 times per week), you will find that fresh readers consistently come to your blog! My favorite social media outlets are Instagram and Facebook, and I post on both daily. You’ll find that social media is a valuable tool: it helps gives you a whole new way to connect to people who share your interests!
Social media is much more effective if you are posting great photos, and Photoshop can really help you to make photos that stand out! If you have a creative blog, it’s also a good idea to cater to Pinterest. Posting photos with a calligraphy or text overlay is a great way to make a “pinnable” image that communicates what a blog post is about! You can learn how to make a photo like the one below — created for the How to Prepare New Calligraphy Nibs for Use post — in the Digitizing Artwork and Calligraphy eCourse.
4. Don’t Worry Too Much About the Appearance of Your Blog At First
No matter what your blog looks like now, it will evolve. When you’re first starting out, you don’t quite know who you’re writing to, and you may not have figured out your own unique style. As you build more and more content, you’ll get to know your readers and yourself. You’ll figure out what you want your website to look like, and you’ll formulate ways to achieve that look! Blogs and websites are constantly evolving, and TPK is no exception: you can use the slideshow below to see how the many iterations this site has been through!
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5. Be Patient
Blogs take time to grow — a lot of time. It’s a labor of love, and that’s what you have to remember as you’re just getting started. If your blog is brand-new, your readership will probably be limited to your family, and that’s okay! Keep writing posts, publicize them on social media and on sites like craftgawker, and you’ll slowly start to notice more visitors. Have heart: in December 2012, an average of 20 readers per day visited the TPK blog. Now, nearly four years later, the daily average is 17,000 and growing! I can’t emphasize this enough: just keep writing!
I really hope that you enjoyed the Creative Blog series, and that you’re all set to create your own little corner of the internet! Here are the first two posts in this series, just in case you missed them:
On Friday, I have a fun little artistic tutorial prepared for you! In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to comment with questions about starting a creative blog. I am more than happy to answer to the best of my ability!
Warmly,