Blogging Tips

I've started blogging again. And I'm noticing that many people are doing the same, but calling their posts "newsletters" or "long form reads" or some other thing, but we are all attempting to do the same thing: write something that exceeds the character limit on whatever micro-blogging platform we use.

I started this blog late in 2008 and very enthusiastically started posting, sometimes several times a week. You can see from this graph that the early enthusiasm lasted only a few months, when I fell back to a posting schedule that was more like once a week:

That continued for a few years until I started writing books...and you can see what happened then. The year 2015 was especially bad, but 2021 wasn't much better.

I learned a few things in my early blogging years that some people who are new to this may wish to heed: keep those posts short! People don't want to read anything longer than 500 words. 300 words is better. (This post is 220 words.)

And use visual images: photos, graphs (as here!), anything to illustrate the words you are writing.

I've set some goals for 2023 and one of them is this: post more on my blog. I'm hoping for once a week. This is the first installment of the year. More to come!