Blog Posts Must Be Written In The Morning

Another thing to hate about mornings. It’s when you should write your daily blog post. I’ve known this for some time. I read an article on the most effective times of day to post on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Morning is good.

But yesterday, looking for new blogs to comment on, I found Write to Done’s post, Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2015. I commented on a few last night. And this morning I thought to add them to a blogroll in the sidebar of my archive blog, Antimatter Life & Lina Lamont. And I discovered something.

Even though I started doing this before 7 in the morning, most of the bloggers on the list had already made a post on their blog today. These are the top writing blogs, people! These writers know something about making their blogs popular enough to garner many readers.

Wait! you may be saying. Morning is when I do my writing! It’s the best time for me! True. A writer must write every day, and morning is the ideal time for most of us. BUT— we ALSO need to get our daily blog post up at the right time. Perhaps you need to get up an hour earlier to get both the blogging and the novel-writing done.

Or you can cheat. You can write your blog post the night before and schedule it to post first thing in the morning. You can also write a few blog comments, especially on smaller blogs that don’t garner many comments. They will be glad of your comments in the morning when they read them. And if they know the importance of comments to their blog’s success, they will go visit your blog to comment upon it.

So— have you written your daily blog post today? Have you syndicated it to Facebook and Twitter? Have you done a little blog reading-and-commenting to give your blog post a good send-off?

Visit my Facebook author page and see a kitten in a boot: https://www.facebook.com/nissalovescats

Author Blogs that Connect Only With Author Blogs

Umberto and Charybdis nap on towel

OK, you’re an author, or an aspiring author, and you have a blog about that. You want your blog to be read. What do you do?

You have to start connecting with other blogs— which means reading a selection of other blogs, commenting on them, and following blogs. One way of finding blogs to do that with is to join blog hops. Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh, of the Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop, is said to comment on thousands of blogs a day.

But there is one little problem— that’s when we as author-bloggers connect mainly with other author bloggers, and participate only in writing-related blog hops. We may connect with author-bloggers across the spectrum or within our own genre communities. And so we are promoting ourselves and our books only to other authors who have their own books to promote. It’s like a salesman giving his sales pitch only to other salesmen.

We need to find non-author blogs to comment on, to make connections with real people. But not just any non-author blogs. You need to get the low-hanging fruit first, and find blogs that connect to the kind of person you are and to what you write.

What do I mean? There are blogs about your various interests, whatever they are, ones that share your beliefs on faith and politics, ones that you just find to be fun. And there are blogs about stuff that bores or appalls you, insults your beliefs on faith and politics, and that you just don’t like. Find the blogs in the first group to comment on.

What to looking for is not the top blogs with many comments on each post, but the lonelier blogs that are grateful to get a comment every now and again. That is where your comments will have more of an impact.

So— the blog search begins. I’ve already found 3 interesting blogs to follow on a list of Catholic blogs. I wish my readers success in finding their own new categories of blogs to follow.

 

 

 

 

Bloggers: You’ve got to be a hooker to get ahead

Kitten Therese after her bath.

You have a blog, and you’ve just written a great blog post. Or a not-so-bad blog post. Or a bad blog post with a cute kitten picture in it (that’s my technique). How do you go about getting people to read it?

I’m the admin of a Facebook group called Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers. Every now and again a new group member promotes their blog by cutting-and-pasting a blog post’s URL and posting it to the group. No intro, no explanation, just the bare URL and whatever Facebook puts up along with it.

Some people use their Facebook pages— personal or other— in the same way. They do it with Twitter. And they are all wrong.

People, sadly, are not born with an innate desire to read YOUR writing. And so, you need to give them a reason to read.

For example: “I just wrote a blog post about methods of toilet cleaning at [URL]. What do you think of it?”

Or, “Have you noticed in the past three days all Democrats have dyed their hair blue? Why do you think they are doing that? [URL].

Now, I post my blog posts to 2 Facebook pages— my personal page and my page Nissa Annakindt, writer, Aspie, cat person— using Networked Blogs so I don’t have a chance to be fancy with intros and such.

In this case, the only way to hook readers is through your post title. For example, in this post instead of talking about hooking your readers, I used the phrase ‘be a hooker’ to get the same meaning across. I’m hoping it might get attention. And I put ‘Bloggers’ specifically because I’m hoping to find some readers looking to get more readers for their blog.

On Twitter, which I don’t use very well, I no longer have it set up to automatically tweet my blog posts. I do that individually so I can make it interesting and put in a useful #hashtag. I also usually post the kitten picture from the top of the blog post on Twitter with the blog post.

So, the next time you decide to post a link to your blog post on Facebook or Twitter, stop and think first. How can you best hook a reader?