A simple guide on how to blog and use social media to promote the blog. Featuring how-to tips, best practices and common questions all bloggers-to-be have, "A Simple Start to Blogging with Social Media," demystifies blogging and launches readers on realizing their blogging dreams.
As a trained journalist, I try to approach every assignment with the assumption that the reader doesn’t automatically know what I’m writing about. Yet, journalism’s rule of thumb seems to have been forgotten among today’s media. Newscasts, newspaper, magazine and online articles about social media and blogs start from the assumption that everybody already knows about these platforms. Maybe they figure if you have a computer, are surfing the web and know how to GOOGLE, you should know about the rest of it. I have to confess it’s an easy trap to fall into. I sometimes forget that while everyone may have heard the terms, they don’t necessarily know what they mean or how they work. And with new developments in social media technology moving at sonic speed, it’s hard enough for journalists to keep up. Thankfully, somebody always comes along to remind me that there are still people waiting to join the social media movement. It usually happens when I receive emails that start like this: “Marisa, I’ve been a longtime admirer of the work you do on your blog. I would like to start a blog too. What’s some advice you can share?” Well, since I’ve been blogging for the past seven years, I realized that I’ve acquired a lot of information to share. It suddenly dawned on me recently, as I was giving out my email address after a speaking engagement to university faculty on how to create their own blogs, that the most helpful thing I could do was write an e-book on the subject. It would be an e-book that gave readers the basic starting points about blogging and social media. It would not be a book that tells you how to market your business via social media, grow your traffic or implement the latest SEO (search engine optimization) tactics to get to the head of the line in online searches. Those are topics better addressed once your blog is up and publishing. It would make more sense at that stage anyway, and for now wouldn’t answer your immediate questions like: • How do I get started? • How do I choose a name for my blog? • What blogging service (platform) do I use? • How often should I blog? • What should I blog? • How do I initially attract readers? • How can I leverage my blog to gain media attention? • How can I make enough money from my blog to quit my day job? • How do I complement my blogging with social media? Everyone who has a blog has had these same questions. Most of us learned by trial and error because nobody created a manual that started where we were. Books on the subject always seemed to be two steps ahead or liberally sprinkled with enough technical terms to either bore you to death or confuse you. Not this time. If your goal is to create a blog and take that first giant leap into social media — and you want to do it in the quickest and least painful way — then what are we waiting for?
Marisa Treviño is a 19-year award-winning career journalist, nationally recognized Latina blogger and founder/publisher of the English-language Latino blog site Latina Lista.