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Blogging - From a Different Angle
By Dawn Goldsmith
Blog. It is the new hoola hoop. Everybody’s got one. Blogging began as a way to
make your personal voice heard. Open your own personal space at cost-free
websites and say whatever you want.
Then of course someone figured out how to make money at it. Set up a site, draw
in advertisers, generate traffic by linking to other sites, forming a network
that brings traffic to your site which features your expert or original voice on
a focused topic.
Any topic, every topic has a blog. Writing, travel, food, disease, technology,
politics…. You name it someone has written about it. Enough knitting, sewing or
quilting blogs started up to circle the globe several times and a community
formed via these links. Of course everyone has an opinion; some like Andrew
Sullivan have become a brand name and draw more than a million visitors to his
site each month for political analysis and news from D.C.
Instead of a writer seeking a market, she creates one through her blog and often
the blog morphs into a book deal. Lifehacker [http://lifehacker.com/software/books/geek-to-live--turn-your-blog-into-a-book-part-i-227707.php
] is one excellent example of a niche market turning into a book. In this case
the blogger, Gina Trapani, focused on “tech tips, tricks and downloads to get
things done.” She explains: “It wasn't until I'd posted to Lifehacker 12 times a
day every weekday for 9 months that I got a career-changing email from David at
LaunchBooks, a literary agent who wanted to know if I was interested in turning
Lifehacker into a book.”
Six more agents contacted her demonstrating that, as Trapani says, there are
lots of tech-savvy literary folks out there, watching and waiting and looking
for good quality web sites that will make for a book deal.”
And then there’s me on the low end of success when you think of Lifehacker and
Andrew Sullivan. My name has not become a national or international brand; I
don’t generate a lot of traffic, but I blog because it motivates me to write and
gets my creative juices moving. I can write about whatever moves me in my
generic “Observations” blog and I focus more on fabric art and artists in my
Subversive Stitch blog.
When I send out queries to markets using the old fashioned method of contacting
editors one at a time, I include a link in the email back to my blogs as well as
to any recent online articles or essays I’ve had published. This gives them
immediate access to samples of my writing and tells them that I am versatile and
have a voice, not to mention success.
Many of my blogs began as simple exercises aimed as a daily post, for my own
satisfaction or curiosity or need to vent. More times than I expected, the blog
turned into a marketable piece of writing. Several of my essays sold to
Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, Birds and Blooms, and Notre Dame
Magazine began as a blogging exercise for my Observations blog. [http://www.wordsogold.blogspot.com/
] Others that I posted to my Subversive Stitchers blog [http://www.subversivestitch.blogspot.com/
] turned into assignments for Quilter's World Magazine.
Markets do not like to find the same article posted to a blog, even one with
minimal traffic such as mine. So before marketing a piece, I remove it or delay
posting it to the blog until after the rights revert back to me.
Blogs certainly are multi-faceted tools for a writer to grow their business and
increase their sales. And then sometimes the best reason to blog is when a
reader happens upon my site and says, “Wow! What a great blog. I really needed
to read what you wrote….” That aspect of blogging is, as the commercial says:
priceless.
BIO
Dawn Goldsmith
http://www.wordsogold.blogspot.com/
http://www.subversivestitch.blogspot.com/
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