How To Blog Well

In the oh-so humble opinion of Rachel G.

Here's what I'd advise anyone who wants to write a blog that people read.

1. Don't be boring. I wouldn't recommend making every post a play-by-play of the average day of your life, unless of course every day of your life consists of activities like skydiving, swimming with sharks, and robbing banks. Even if your life does consist of such activities on a daily basis, I wouldn't recommend writing about the robbing banks part. Legal reasons, you know.

 Husband+Shovel=Funny

2. Have a funny husband. (See mine, for example). If you don't have that, have funny kids. Or a funny pet. Or, better yet, do funny things yourself. People who have time to hang out on the internet reading stuff are often looking for a laugh, so give it to them.

3. Play to your strengths. I'm not very good at writing on serious topics that pull at your heart-strings. It's like I almost can't help but throw in a joke or two to ease the tension. I can be serious when called for but it's not my favorite way to write, so you won't see seriousness from me very often. At the same time--I don't have the patience to even sit down and read through a tutorial or a recipe properly, let alone write a craft tutorial or a recipe properly, so I'm not going to annoy myself trying to write something that I'm not good at writing. I'll leave recipes and tutorials and seriousness to those who are good at it, because chances are, if I hate writing a post, not very many people are going to enjoy reading it!

4. Don't give in to peer pressure. Just because "everyone" hates CAPTCHA doesn't mean that you have to. Just because "everyone" is wearing peplums doesn't mean you have to, either. You don't have to go to Disneyworld or buy a professional blog design, and you don't have to watch The Bachelor or know what the latest Katy Perry song is called. I'm going to let you in on a little secret: There's really no such thing as "everyone". We're all different.

5. At the same time, if you want comments and readers...you might not want to be too weird. That might be my problem. I'm ornery. When Christmas is the talk of the season, I want to talk about the 4th of July, and when New Girl or Real Housewives are the kind of shows I hear other people talking about, I want to proclaim from the rooftops that I love The Red Green Show and Gilligan's Island with all my heart. When other people ask nicely for sponsors, I try to seduce  people into sponsoring me. Even my husband says that he thinks I'm weird. So be you...but maybe secretly act a little normal until you trick people into loving you and then be yourself again.

 I'm spoiled--I've got a whole family full of pretty!

6. Be pretty. Or at least make a blog design or take pictures that aren't hard to look at. Most of us don't like looking at ugly or obnoxiously loud things--so if you want people to stay, make your blog look inviting.

7. Write in English. If your audience is American or generally composed of people from English-speaking areas of the world. Actually, 一个妇女 像 你一样  is one of my top 5 most viewed posts of all time. Why, I don't know, but judging by the lack of comments, people don't really know what to say when you post in other languages, so I wouldn't recommend it.

 My unfriendly face

8. Be friendly. That's what my mom told me after she met Angel for the first time and she knew that she wanted me to catch him. I think the same is true for blogging. Email, comment, tweet, swap ads, guest post, collaborate with others on big projects. The most valuable things in life are relationships, so don't miss out on your opportunity to build them through blogging.

9. Don't say the same thing everyone else does. If you want people to read, you have to offer them something of value that they can't get just anywhere. If you're familiar with the typical list of blogging tips, you'll notice that here I didn't mention that you should not be a no-reply blogger, that you should not write "Follow me, and I'll follow you back" type of comments, or that you should post consistently. All of that has been said before and said thoroughly. Instead, I'll telling you my ideas, the ones that you might not see in other places.

 10. Don't title your posts "Bare With Me". Because then people are going to snicker and they may not even tell you to your face that you made an amusing grammatical mistake. The phrase is 'bear with me.'