Blogging – Whys and Wherefores
Posted on | May 18, 2010 | 9 Comments
I came to the Internet fairly early. I was on several of the early bulletin board services with my very slow modem back during the dark ages before the Internet was invented. Then I joined AOL. How exciting was that? (Yes, I still have my AOL account all these many years later. I have my own company email account but enough people from my life have that AOL address I just keep the service going.)
Steve is the entrepreneurial visionary of our company. When we started writing together, he saw the potential of the Internet in a way quite distinct from the simply communication and information device that I had been using it for. We wanted to tap into that power. We also wanted to take charge of our creative lives instead of relying on others to get our stuff out to the world. We created an on-line Amazon affiliate store, then created what eventually became our best-selling novel Weeping Willow, which was, initially, an on-line serial.
As proud of it as we were, the Amazon store went nowhere, but Weeping Willow took off in a delightful way. We created a forum so we could interact with and get to know our readers. They were always delighted when something that we’d discussed on the forum ended up in the story. The forum was over-run by spammers, so we shut it down, but by then we’d been bitten by the bug.
When blogging first started to become mainstream, rather than simply a way for people to make the minutia of their lives public, I set up a blog on one of the free services. Then I found out how to set my own blog up and created http://www.ThatWouldBeMe.net – a place to write (mostly) humorous essays, sort of in the vein of the stuff David Sedaris was doing live on NPR. Steve also put up a blog. When we started teaching creative writing, we put this blog up to connect with our students about the process of writing.
We put up the blogs to communicate with our current audience. Quite without our noticing it, and quite without any master plan, these blogs have absolutely increased our audience, both for the fiction stuff and our creative writing courses. We realized we had something, here.
People began to notice that I was getting my name out to the world in large part because of the blogs. Blogging is powerful. You should have one!
~Geoff Hoff
Geoff Talks about blogging live at BloggingForWriters.net/call.
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May 18th, 2010 @ 3:47 pm
Hi Geoff,
I agree that everyone, especially in business, should consider having a blog. They are great tools to communicate with your customers, clients, audience… and to introduce new people to “who you are” and your offers.
That’s funny about the Amazon store back then, I tried the same thing with no luck… well, I made about $15 in three months. LOL.
I also had an MSN group with a forum that was quite popular, until the spammers got a hold of it.
Blogs are definitely the way to go.
Nice post!
.-= Deb Augur´s last blog ..Do Follow: Reward Your Blog Commenters! =-.
May 18th, 2010 @ 3:59 pm
Thanks, Deb!
I’ve had a couple of forums that I’ve had to shut down. Spammers should all, if you’ll pardon the expression, curl up and die.
If it weren’t for Akismet spam filtering, I’d go a but nuts on the blogs, but that makes life smooth and clean, doesn’t it?
I agree, everyone should have a blog!
May 23rd, 2010 @ 2:36 pm
I didn’t realized spammers could be so distructive, Geoff, but I’ll keep an eyeball peeled for that. Hmmmmmm…makes me think of an awesome onion blossom, but well, I haven’t had lunch yet.
.-= Kate´s last blog ..Conversion Architecture — The Art of Visually Identifying Your Company’s Primary Sales Funnels =-.
May 23rd, 2010 @ 2:45 pm
Mmm. Onion Blossoms. With fried Spam.
May 23rd, 2010 @ 5:19 pm
My first blog was Finch Fest, talking about Australian zebra finches. Once every couple years I get an Adsense check from it, or maybe from another old blog I’d just as soon forget.
I still have a few birds. If I didn’t take their eggs away, I’d be hip-deep in birds. Actually, they like to be high, so if they ever outgrew their cages, they’d circle my head and shoulders like clouds with whirring wings.
Would that I could leave you something more valuable like that flourless chocolate cake you mentioned (you made my hungry, darn you), but I see you’ve moved on to onion blossoms with a disgusting side dish. Hee!
May 23rd, 2010 @ 8:46 pm
Karen,
My brother used to keep zebra finches. Also had some Java Temple birds who sounded like computer beeps. He called them Hewlett and Packard. Really. My whole family is a bit odd.
Good on you for making something from AdSense. Every penny counts.
Making your mouth water with my words is more than enough to have gotten from you.
June 2nd, 2010 @ 10:51 pm
Great story. I’m so glad that there are soooo many spam protections now for bloggers and forums. Yes, I remember the gap when the spammers arrived and no anti-spam solutions existed – eeeek!. But now, all seems good, so we can all blog-on in peace
June 27th, 2010 @ 10:57 pm
I’m relatively new to blogging, as compared to you and so many others. It was the end of 2005 before I knew they existed. During 2006 I started 10 blogs, insisting to the world that I was a woman of diverse interests. I still have all of these, but now my students post to them to get the exposure they need and deserve.
Now I teach that your blog is your home on the Internet. I maintain two blogs, and these keep my creative juices flowing, giving me a connection to my readers and lots of content to repurpose. Blogging has made me a writer, and that was what I really wanted all along.
.-= Connie Ragen Green´s last blog ..The ‘Earn While You Learn’ Method of Internet Marketing =-.
June 28th, 2010 @ 7:35 am
Connie – I like that, your home on the Internet. Yes, I agree with you about all the reasons to blog!