Some Thoughts about Blogging on a Sunday Morning, a Post from R. Clint Peters

Several times a day, I scroll my Twitter tweets page down to see who has sent out tweets, so I can retweet the ones I feel are important.  Which are important?  My friend’s tweets, the tweets sent by members of The Really Big Book Store or The Book Reviewers club, or something that catches my eye.

As I have previously discussed, Twitter works by providing the possibility of your Tweet being seen by your followers.  If you Tweet something important, and one of your followers sees that Tweet, they may act upon it.

For example, if someone sees this blog, and is interested in blogs tweeted by The Book Reviewers Club, he or she might click on the link to the Tweet.  That is the formula that drives millions of Twitter accounts — that one tweet out of thousands will be seen by someone interested in following the links.

Try my favorite Twitter test.  Sign into your Twitter account, insure you are looking at the tweets page, click on the banner telling you how many tweets you have received (to zero the counter out), and then check the time.  Wait five minutes, and then check the counter once more.  If you are following a large number of Twitter accounts, you will have received hundreds, if not thousands, of tweets.  Can you read all of them?  I doubt a super computer could read all of them.

As I was scrolling down my tweets page earlier, I saw five tweets that I decided to retweet.  It is a simple task  — hover the cursor under the tweet, and click on the retweet banner.

One tweet caught my eye.  It looked like my granddaughter’s text messages when she was 10 years old, specifically, lots of interspersed caps and lower case letters,  contractions like ‘u’ for ‘you’, and two miss-spelled words.  And, the tweet seemed to indicate the rantings and ravings of someone hovering on going postal.

I clicked on the tweet, and discovered a moderately well designed blog.  It has some good things and some bad things.  I suppose I could have overlooked the bad things if the good things were better.  However, the number one thing I noticed was the blogger had not attempted to clean up his or her blogs.  They all had atrocious spelling, punctuation, and content problems.

Let’s assume that the blog author was directing his or her blogs at a specific target.  That target could only be readers who were almost illiterate, who could not spell, knew nothing of punctuation, and could not put two thoughts together.  That certainly narrows down the audience.

As I read the blog, I remember something I had seen a few days ago.  It was the reasons why you should have a well constructed blog.  You can read the complete article here:  http://paulinemagnusson.com/creating-killer-content-5-reasons-content-matters-business

The first reason was creating credibility.  No matter what the content of the blog, if the blog author cannot spell, has no idea how to properly punctuate the post, and switches between caps and lower case letters, the blog becomes tedious.  It is just unreadable.  And, all caps, in the texting world, indicates the writer is shouting.  Sorry, I get shouted at too much as it is.

The second reason was the boomerang effect.  You want people to come back to your blog time and again.  A crappy blog will not do that.

The third reason is to attract people to sign up for your blog.  You want readers to be interested in seeing what you are doing.  You want the fact you posted something on the blog to show up in someone’s email.  You want to make it as easy as possible for readers to receive your brilliant musings.

The fourth reason is one the article called the cliffhanger effect.  You create content that has readers looking for more.  You write, they read, and then they wait for you to write again.

Finally, a blog will start a conversation.  It will give the reader something to comment about, and open up a line of communication extending from the blog author to the blog reader.

One thing I have tried to do in my own blogging is create something that is of value to my readers.  It is often something I have read somewhere on the Internet, and is important to the focus that I have created for The Book Reviewers Club and the blog readers.  I do not blog about the oceans rising because the icecaps are theoretically rising.  I blog about what authors can do to get their product out to more potential buyers, which may include some tidbits on how to write, how to blog, using social media, or anything that might benefit an author.

I hope that this blog is considered valuable to those who read it.  I have a simple request for readers:  make a comment on The Book Reviewers Club blog site to just tell me that you have read the blog.  In addition, if you would like, tell me how The Book Reviewers Club blog is doing.

#RClintPeters