This will be the final installment of the blogging series for now, and I hope it’s helped illuminate what blogging can be about. If you have questions or other topics you’d like me to address, leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do. Here’s the links to parts two and three in this series:

Blogging Step Two; Where To Create Your Blog

Blogging Step Three; How To Create Your Blog

Aurelio Asiain via Compfight

If you’ve read all the previous installments, then you remember that step one dealt with think about what you want to write about. Now we get a bit further into it. A recommendation I’ll make is, if you’re not sure how to get started on your topic, write down 10 things you believe you can write something on. If you can’t think of at least 10 topics from the beginning then you’re already in trouble, and you didn’t learn anything from step one.

This part should be fairly easy, though. For instance, let’s say your blog is going to be on show dogs. One would assume your first post is going to be about dog shows in general, just to get started. Then you could write about what judges look for in individual dogs, or you can pick specific dogs to talk about, which would be a bunch of topics. You could talk about the history of certain dog shows, or previous winners of the dog shows, both the dogs and the trainers. Heck, you could talk about trainers, and families of winners throughout history. For someone who may be thinking about this as a blog topic, I’ve just given you at least 100 posts.

The “how” is somewhat different. A question I’ve heard asked over and over is how long a blog post should be. The true answer is a blog post should be as long or as short as it needs to be. If you look at the last 10 posts on this blog, for instance, you’ll see that four were long, four were short, and two were somewhere in the middle. A blog post really can be one paragraph; probably shouldn’t be one line, unless you’re highlighting an image, movie, or sound file of some type. A blog post can be long, but just how long is long? If you’re writing a dissertation it’s too long; no one is going to stick around that long reading a blog post. It’s too much like work; blogs aren’t supposed to be that detailed.

That’s why I’ve broken this up into a series, instead of putting it all into one post. But another reason for doing it is that it’s given me four posts instead of just one, which obviously helps me build up my content, but it gives me more opportunities to advertise some stuff; yeah, it’s a little crass, but hey, a guy’s gotta try to make a buck, right? If you can break a very long post up, you still get to say everything you wanted to say, but spread out, you give people a reason to keep coming back for more.

And there you go; we’ve made it through a whole short series on blogging. Now I can chill and maybe post a video of something; yeah, we all need more videos. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.