Blogineering

Now that you know what blogging platform to use (WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr, for instance) for your blog, it is important to know and decide what to write or blog about.

Many people suddenly just jump into blogging without thinking in the longer term. There are quite a few questions you need to answer for yourself when you start blogging. Some of these include the following:

• What should you write about?
• Can you sustain your blog?
• Is your topic interesting enough for readers to go and visit your blog and subscribe to it and interact with you?
• Can you continue writing about this thing you are blogging right now?

There are many blogs out there that are launched, and were just abandoned after two or three posts. Your blog shouldn’t be like this. It has to be updated, if not every day, at least thrice or four times a week. At least. That way, people who stumble upon your blog will know that it is something you are intent of keeping on doing, so this will make them come back every now and then to read your posts and hopefully interact with you.

Having said that, it is important that you like what you blog or write about. You cannot go up and start a blog about something, and then write intermittently because all of a sudden you lost interest in what you are writing about initially. Therefore it is important to choose your niche. Don’t write about your random thoughts unless you’re a class A writer. If I am a reader who is interested about math, then I would prefer to read a blog that discusses all about math or math-related topics rather than a blog that discusses math, cooking, mountain climbing, and movies.

Choose a topic that you can write about for a very long time. In short, choose to write things that you are an expert at, or at least things that you know quite well. If you write about things that you do not know much, sooner or later, you’ll be forced to do a lot of reading and research. And I bet that you don’t want to do that just to have a new post for the week.

Your blog should have a targeted audience. You should choose a topic that is not general, but not too specific. If you want to write about mathematics, then choose a more specific category (e.g. K-12 mathematics, College Math Teaching, Differential Geometry, Grade 6-8 contest problems). If your topic is too general (say, mathematics), then you will have millions of competitors (all math websites and blogs).

Write about things that your targeted audience would want to read. Nobody will read and come back to read your exploits with your boyfriend, or what the color of your cat is – unless you are a celebrity.

Last but not the least, read as much as you can from other blogs’ tips and tricks and guides (or you could just bookmark Blogineering.com and try to visit us in your free time – I guarantee you will pick a tip or two in starting and improving your blog).