THE JOYS OF BLOGGING

---

A blog, short for web log, is just a website designed to put your opinion or expertise online. You may have different reasons for starting a blog and it invariably leaves you enriched. With a creative control over your own little corner of the internet is a great way to learn new things and express yourself. With so many free blogging services it's fairly easy to set up a professional-looking website. Many blogs take the form of an online diary, with pictures, audio and even video.

Why do we blog?

There could be many reasons for starting a blog like-

1.   Blogging makes you a better writer and thinker.

2.   You meet thousands of new people & followers through comments, social media or email.

3.   You can share your adventures and experience with far-flung family and friends.

4.   You can run a club of special interest groups like cooking, gardening, fishing and golfing.

5.   It is a way to keep everybody informed in an informal way and is replacing the old fashioned newsletter in many institutions

6.   You help and inspire others through your blog.

7.   You can promote your own business or services through blogging.

8.   You become popular and more confident.

Whatever is the reason, the point is a blog can be a very powerful tool for achieving various goals. Understanding your end-goal will help you decide what kind of service to use to create your blog.

Why is it easy?

You don't need a writing degree or web design skills. There's a wide range of places for you to web-publish your creation. They all have designer-created templates to make your work look polished and professional. All you have to do is add your ideas in your own words.

Who's your audience?

1.   Are you an expert giving advice to novices or are you writing for people with the same level of knowledge as you?

2.   Is your audience there for a good time or are they more of a serious crowd?

3.   Are you spreading awareness about a group or publicizing a cause,

4.   Do you want to build an online community for your profession and profit?

If it's just for you and immediate family and friends, your focus should be on keeping it fresh, interesting and satisfying. On the other hand if your aim is to get readers from far and wide to take notice of your skills and highlight your profession then it has to be formal and efficiently organized.

How do you reach your audience?

Be a member of multiple social media groups in multiple social media platforms – Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Instagram, Twitter. Write briefly about your new blog and post it in these groups along with the hyperlink to your new blog.

Follow other discussions whenever you find time and if you have written on the same topic then write a comment with a hyperlink to your relevant blog.

If your clinic help / nurse is sitting idle then give your phone to her and request her to pass on your blog information to all your WhatsApp contacts.

How do you keep your audience with you?

There are a few tricks which I will share with you:

1.   Treat them with respect. Just because they are likely to be less knowledgeable than you about a subject (which is why you're writing the blog) doesn't mean they're not as smart. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you want something explained to you? Assume your readers are just as intelligent as you and go from there.

2.   Always answer or acknowledge questions and comments with respect. If your readers see that you respond to their comments promptly there will be more comments and your blogs will be more popular.

3.   Be regular and consistent with your blogs. Consistency is more important than frequency. Irregular blog contributions can frustrate your readers. Two articles on the same day followed by a two-month break look disorganized and unprofessional.

4.    Stick to your style. You don’t have to be like any other successful blogger, be yourself. Don’t be shy. Let your personality shine through. Very soon your audience will know what to expect from you.

What do you write about?

Choosing your topic is vital because if you are not passionate about it, it shows. Some bloggers are wedded to their topics. So you might find people writing only about the economy like Mr. Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar or only about politics like Mr. Manoj Joshi or Mr. Pawan Verma or only about Travel like Ms. Mridula Dwivedi or only aboutsports like Mr. Boria Majumdar and Mr. Aiyaz Memon. You will like to follow them only if you too are interested in their respective topics of interest. A bigger challenge is to write randomly about everything under the sun. I personally find this encasement of mind very stifling and suffocating and so my topics are varied because that is how I am, passionate about many things. So I have written about

·        Travelogue and travel related topics – Kailash Mansarovar, Kerala, Window Seat, Waiting for your bags

·        Food – Breakfast the world loves, Biriyani, From a Street Food Junkie

·        Art – Monalisa, Dali, Mario Miranda, The Birth of Venus, The Scream, The Creation of Adam, The Kiss, Lost Forever

·        Literature – Lost Forever, Book Reviews, Upapandavas

·        Lifestyle – Farming, Fishing, Public Speaking, Monkey Caps, Working from home, Value of Solitude, Midlife – Where is the crisis?

·        Medicine – Acid Attacks, Transplants, Medical Education, Corona, Synthetic Biology, Performance Anxiety

·        History – The Vanquished Never Write History, History Books are not serving the purpose

·        Education – Why Education is pulling us back? Madarsa Education, Higher Education – open the deadlock

·        Politics – Need a new political party, Marooned in fantasy island, Abrogation of Article 370, Huge fan of Trump Comedy, Reservation-now in Y axis

·        Religion – Navratri, Durga Puja and Women Empowerment, Kali Puja

·        Recent Advances – Phytoceauticals, Anti Aging, Simulation and Lab Training

What are the hallmarks of good blogging?

A good blog is one that leaves the reader enriched, pleased and wanting for more. They are used to the style of the blogger and know what to expect from him/her and hate to be disappointed. They have the attention span of a butterfly and so they need the information promised by the blog title as quickly as possible. There are some mistakes a blogger should never make:

Accurate article titles

Don't get caught dreaming up attractive, snappy titles that have little to do with the article's content. Your readers will figure it out pretty quickly and leave.

Web search engines will also pick up on this trend and mark you down as an unreliable source for that particular search phrase or topic. This means you get fewer readers over time. Give your blog posts an intriguing title, but keep it relevant and honest.

Do not leave the core subject

Aim for one core topic or focus, with a smattering of related content to keep things fresh. A blog about golfing will appeal to golfers, but if you include your passion for red wine and love of Hawaiian shirts you'll struggle to find readers interested in all three. If you want to discuss a wider range of subjects, find a link between them.

For example, food and travel go well together because people like to read about different foods from interesting places. Once you can easily balance those two, you might add fine wine into the mix, as it's often specific to a region and goes well with food.

If you have lots of information and opinions on different subjects you might even consider creating separate blogs.

Have a strong lead

The lead is the sentence that introduces the subject matter and hooks the reader. Put it in your first sentence, not several paragraphs lower. The readers can lose interest and leave before they get to the good stuff.

Show the good stuff early

After your introduction (complete with a good lead), put the most important information next. Most people never read an entire web article, so to make sure they easily find the information they came for, put it up top.

You can always put supporting information after the main parts, for those that need it.

Keep paragraphs short

These days it is likely that most of your blog traffic will come from people using a Smartphone. So, keep paragraphs short or your reader will have to scroll forever on their tiny screen. Try to limit your paragraphs to two-to-four sentences if you can.

Text type and size

Larger, more spacious fonts work better online. Calibri and Arial are good staples, as are Verdana and Georgia. Avoid fancier fonts such as Lucida Handwriting and Forte; they're harder to read and slow down your readers. And avoid Comic Sans.

It's hard to nominate a specific font size for online – just make sure your text doesn't have the tiny lettering. Easy reading is the key for the casual online audience. Templates will have typefaces and sizes already set, so go with what they give you, at first anyway.

Use subheadings

Regular subheadings act as anchor points. They help the reader keep track of where they are and what topic they're reading about. They also visually break up large slabs of type.

Make your subheadings directly relevant to your content rather than overly clever and 'punny'. This will both help your readers keep track and make your blog post turn up better in web search results.

Self-editing your blog

Edit as you go for spelling, grammar, correct context and conciseness. This will make subsequent edits easier. For the final edit, leave your blog post alone for a few hours, if not a day. Then come back to it with fresh eyes. If you don't, you risk missing obvious mistakes that your eyes have become accustomed to glossing over. By producing half cooked half baked blogs with silly mistakes you insult your readers and they will soon abandon you.

Copyright considerations

You can't just pinch images from other websites willy-nilly. It's illegal to use copyrighted words or images from other websites without express (preferably written) permission by the copyright holder, unless it falls under 'fair use' provisions.

However, you can freely use many materials, such as images, that have a Creative Commons license. This lets you distribute, remix, tweak and build upon the original work (depending on the nature of the license) so long as you give credit for the original creation.

What do you want to achieve?

First, work out why you're starting a blog. To me it was ‘Swantah Sukhaya’. I love communication with people and sharing my experience and benefiting from theirs’. I now have a very large pool of friends from all over the world with whom I can remain in constant touch with absolute geographical neutrality. 

But if you want to propagate your scope of practice then blogs on subjects like Face lift, Tummy Tuck, Breast Reduction, Laser rejuvenation etc can be of use to you. But please do not post your patient’s photograph without their consent.

Which blogs are popular?

Well written, well composed, well designed and well publicized blogs are popular. But you really do not know what clicks people’s imagination, Two of my most popular blogs each with more than 40,000 visits and over 300 comments are

1.   Letter from a father to his son who is getting engaged

2.   Never argue with the Anaesthetiest

These were both very personal blogs but somehow caught the attention of people from 6 continents!

An event which is currently in news will always be more popular and so all my blogs on Corona Pandemic were very well received. A blog on Kumbh Mela while it was on, one on Notre Dame inferno on the day it burnt down were hugely popular. I went to Turkey in 2010 and was mesmerized by the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul dividing the two continents but two weeks back I chose to write about Hagia Sophia because it was in news after its conversion into a mosque.

If you write for a target audience you usually get a favourable response from that group but not necessarily from others. Thus my blogs

1.   Reaching 60, time to start the second innings

2.   Why can’t adults make friends

3.   A dearth of PG teachers in Medical Institutions

4.   The Class Teacher’s Home Visit

were very popular with a section of my readership but not with all

 

Free Blogs vs Self Hosted Paid Blogs

There are 2 ways to make a blog - one is free and other is by paying around $100 (Rs 7500) for a domain name & hosting.

Popular free blogging sites

• WordPress.com
• Blogger.com
• Tumblr.com
• Strikingly.com
• LiveJournal.com

A free service is good if you're new to blogging and just want a way to express yourself, or let friends and family know what you've been up to, without incurring extra costs. Usually they will provide a free web address for your blog, such as ‘surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com'.

Popular paid blog builders

• Squarespace.com
• Wix.com
• Weebly.com
• Wordpress.com
• Smugmug.com

Paid platforms give you more options and ready-to-go templates that do much of the heavy lifting for you. You can start off simple and expand your blog's website as you gain experience. Experienced users can also build everything from scratch. Payment is usually monthly or yearly.

So why should you go for the paid sites when there are free sites available? I am giving you 6 compelling reasons why you shouldn’t start a free blog.

• On a free blog site the domain name of your blog will look like surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com or YourBlogName.wix.com which is too lengthy to read as compared to a paid blog that will read  surajitbrainwaves.com.
• You will face serious limitations incorporating many design changes.
• Monetization will become difficult affecting your revenue adversely.
• The whole process of shifting from free platform to paid one is very tedious and you might also lose some of the traffic & revenue.
• Your readers, advertisers and clients are not going to take you seriously if you are on a free site.
• Lastly, you are not in control of your content because everything is in the hands of the free platform you are using. If anything goes wrong with your blog, they will suspend your blog & you can't do anything.

Can you make money blogging?

The short answer is yes, you can make money from blogging. But no, it's not easy. Publishing your blog for profit is a whole different exercise that requires a systematic approach, consistent effort and a fairly steep learning curve.

The easiest way to start making money with advertising is through Adsense. Sign up for an account; enter in the ad settings you want like a 300×250 sized banner placed below the first paragraph of a post! It is a rude interruption for your readers but may be profitable for you. You should be able to make as much as $1 per 1,000 visitors to your site if you have enough placements, and while that won’t sound like much, once you reach 25,000 visitors a month, you can leave Adsense, join Mediavine and start making 10 times more money with advertising.

You can also earn through selling products and services on other’s behalf which is also known as affiliate marketing. Amazon Associate is one such example. Any time you mention a product on your site, you can search for the product through Amazon Associates, and then use that link in your post. Whenever your readers click on that link and choose to buy anything, you’ll receive a commission on that sale. Packing lists, in-depth reviews, and gift guides are great for monetizing through Amazon, so get started with those. But don’t over do it.

You may need to learn about online marketing, using social media platforms, blog directories, search engine optimization (SEO), ad services and affiliate programmes. You might even create an online store for selling your product, such as art, crafts, t-shirts and other stuff.

Top bloggers can make big money, but you might be happy if you can just cover your online costs, so that your hobby pays for itself. Web search "make money blogging" or similar for more info.

Keep it fun!

Making your blog should be interesting and fun, but if the pressure of regular, fresh content starts to pall, you might need to alter your approach, change your schedule or broaden your topic. Think about what you know and love best and start sharing.

Is it too late? Nope! Hell no. Seriously — it’s not too late. 

Enjoy this Instagram chat: 
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CDMMgQhpcL6/?igshid=ltft1uqwssds