Tips for business bloggers - part 1

Now that I've pulled myself away from Rock Band 2 (not an easy task), I have time to write about what I was supposed to write about yesterday.

The other day, a friend of mine forwarded me an e-mail entitled Tips for Strategic Bloggers (with a subtitle of Tips for Business Bloggers somewhere in there). Despite being business-oriented tips, I decided to give it a full read and see what tips applied to me.

1. Don't start unless you were born to blog or need to blog.

Very few people can keep up the pace month after month, year after year, having something original to say, something worth saying. (However, a competent and persistent blogger can have fun and influence people.)

I don't think I was born to blog, nor do I REALLY need to, but I do have a lot of uninteresting yet honest stories to tell (because all the interesting ones have already been written). But since I decided to join the Blog Every Day April challenge, I guess my 'need' is my drive to prove that I can follow-through on long-term goals. Hmph, funny how close to stubbornness that sounds.

I don't think my long-term commitment/stubbornness is really in question here. For example, a couple of years ago I decided to play a long-term joke on one my friends.

You see, he was sufferring from ongoing pain in his knee, and like any concerned friend I would ask him how his knee was. But I didn't want to be just concerned, I wanted to be a dick. So every day, whenever I'd see him, I'd ask him how his knee was so that my 'concern' would eat into his patience in little nibbles until he'd go insane.

This went on for about a month until he was talking about it with another friend. For the next paragraph's sake, let's call my knee-hurting friend 'Simon', and the person he's talking to 'Janna':

Simon: "Em keeps asking me how my knee is."
Janna: "Yeah."
Simon: "It's... starting to get annoying.
Janna: "You know why he's doing it right?"

Well, let's just say that after that, the next time I saw him was the last time I asked him how his knee was.

So if I can be a dick for a month, then blogging every day for that length of time shouldn't be too difficult, right?

2. Think first about strategy: what do you hope to achieve with this blog?

Focus sharply. Explain your angle or topic in your tagline or description.

Strategy? Angle? Topic? Tagline? lol wut?

OK, so it's obvious I didn't enter into this thing with a strategy in mind. Looking at the categories I file my blogs under, I'm neither here nor there, and the topics get around (kinda like your mum) and I talk about whatever comes to mind (eg: your mum). There's no focus, but neither does the mind have any when it needs to come up with something new every month.

I guess my 'strategy' is to take any ordinary thing that happens to me and turn it into a multi-paragraph blog post, which is exactly what I've been doing so far. I mean, look at what I've talked about: my neighbours, April Fool's Day, ice cream, breakfast, my dry lips, how often I get sick, my work, my work (again), and Rock Band 2.

It's not paperback fiction stuff, but it's what gets me by.

(stay tuned for part 2 where I go through more of the blogging tips listed in that e-mail)