This week, TrainingMatchmaker.com Trainers brought the Get Blogging NI 6 week course for Libraries NI to life in Lisburn City Library.
An audience of 10 bloggers and aspiring bloggers and marketers, (well they all opted to want people to read their blogs), heard from Trainer Chartered Marketer Christine Watson:
- where blogging, voging, vlogging, audio blogging and podcasting came from
- how to get started [or restarted blogging]
- some tips and tricks of the trade
- where blogging, voging, vlogging, audio blogging and podcasting came from
- Getting Started, the basics
- Creating, Marketing and Distributing Your Content
- Building Audience, Readership and Engagement
- Commercialising and Monetising
- Legals and Ethics
- Measuring Success
- The Costs of Blogging
- Blogging is accessible – even if you are tweeting, you are in fact microblogging and if you don’t want your own blog platform you can in this day and age use options such as Facebook Notes, LinkedIn articles or Guest blog in order to just do it and ‘Get Blogging’. Costs are not prohibitive – blogging is free if you want it to be but you can always invest in a £1 video stand from Poundland or more, should you choose to.
- There are more bloggers in this world than realise it, if you have a blog section on your website and it has some content on it produced by you then yes, you are a blogger. InternetLiveStats was a great tool to represent our point here.
- If you want people to read your blog then you are going to have to aspire to become a marketer as well as a blogger. The Get Blogging NI programme covers more on this in week 2, 3 and 4
- Follow Kipling’s poetic advice: “I KEEP six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.” – read the full poem over on the Kipling Society Website.
- Go with your Heart – Always start with your Why and surely then you can’t go far wrong in terms of investing your time and energy in blogging and if you do, well, that’s ok too as long as you are not breaking the law you can simply take steps to change your blog and/or your blogging in the future. Our learners at this point got one of our little heart shaped post it notes and a little time to really think about their own personal or professional Why.
- To go and seek inspiration from other bloggers. It was a surprise to many to learn that the Huffington Post is classified as one of the most successful blogs in the world and to hear of the blogs earning the most monthly income. Find out more here from Forbes and here from another blog. Neither was Zoella known to everyone in the room nor her disappointing Advent Calendar escapade. We are a huge fan of benchmarking and Money Saving Martin is one of our favourite bloggers on a personal level. It would really be great to hear of more inspirational blogs discovered and read from our little group, over the course of the next 6 weeks [sure, maybe we could collectively write a blog on that before our course graduation on December 6!]
- To learn about all of the different types of blogs – not just that there are blogs, vlogs, podcasts, facebook notes, tweets and linkedin articles but that there are lots of options from listicles to guest blogging to thought leadership to creating versus curating, collaborating and repurposing.
- To be aware of all of the platforms available for hosting blogs, yes, wordpress does have the highest market share by far but other options are growing in popularity year on year – check out the increases in SquareSpace and Wix. You can read up more on all the options available from Blogger Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights who has compiled his essential digital marketing tools for our benefit. During week 1 we also showed behind the scenes of wordpress, for us, uploading a blog is akin to creating a Microsoft Word document – when we click ‘visual’ instead of ‘text’.
- To be conscious of your blog brand – you – what people say about you when you’re out of the room.
- To think about your target audience/reader/viewer at all times and take time to consider who they are and what ‘a life in the day of’ means to them. Will they read our blogs on their commute, on a bus or train, which often takes place between the hours of 8 and 8.30am or 5 and 6pm and actively discourages video consumption for example?
- a video by Qualman – Socialnomics and discussed the 7 second attention span and what that meant for our blogging [in terms of readers anyway and not necessarily those google search spiders that we may well aspire to].
- Â What is Blogging
- Â Getting Started, the basics
- Â Creating, Marketing and Distributing Your Content
- Â Building Audience, Readership and Engagement
- Â Commercialising and Monetising
- Â Legals and Ethics
- Â Measuring Success
- Â The Costs of Blogging