Beginner's Guide to Creative Blogging: How to Set Yourself Up for Success

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Blogging is a wonderful creative outlet and a beautiful way to market your work while growing a loyal following. But where do you start? That's where this class comes in. Hi, I'm Anne Butera. I've been blogging for more than 12 years. In the beginning, the blogging community encouraged the first tentative steps toward painting I shared on my blog. Later I was able to earn features in a book and magazines, collaborate with other artists, land interviews on podcasts, and grow a loyal following of customers and students. I've also developed enduring friendships, all thanks to my blog. Although blogging has changed a lot over the years, I believe it's more relevant than ever. There's more and more artists become dissatisfied on social media. Blogging provides a meaningful alternative. This class is designed so you can set yourself up for success on your terms. I'll walk you through the process of planning and research so you can discover the right platform for your needs and create a beautiful online home. I'll help you figure out what to write about, how to develop your voice, and how to define your niche. You'll construct a schedule you can stick with and build a collection of post ideas. After working through these lessons, you'll get clear on your blog's purpose, and ready to begin growing your audience by creating well-written pieces which will connect with your readers. When I was still only dreaming of making art, reading artist's blogs inspired me to believe in my creative dreams. Today, with my blog and my classes, I aim to pay it forward. That's why this class is so special to me. You have a story that only you can tell. The world needs your gifts. I can't wait to see you share them. If you're ready to dive into the beautiful world of blogging, I'll see you in class. 2. Relax: You want to start a blog or maybe you wanted to revive a blog you haven't touched in a while. I'm so excited about that. I love blogs, I love blogging and I can't wait to see yours. When I was putting this class together, I asked students to share their questions and anything they wanted to learn about blogs and blogging and so many of you had a lot of questions. There were a lot of very detailed things you wanted to know, which boiled down to you wanting to know the right way to put together your blog, the right way to be a blogger. It got me thinking you've probably seen either classes or read articles or blog posts that are sharing specific, rigid rules of what you should do and what you shouldn't do to be successful. I recently was reading a post by a blogger that I admire, her site is lovely, her photography is gorgeous, her writing is beautiful. She has a very engaged audience, lots of people leaving comments, sharing their thoughts, really connecting with her writing, with her, and with the other people in this community that she's built online. But she was admonishing herself in a blog post about breaking a certain rule of blogging, something that I found to be very arbitrary. I was wondering why someone who felt or who seemed to feel so confident in her blog could be tripped up by something like that. I don't want you to feel that way because I'm betting you can guess what I'm going to say. There is no one right way to blog. There are no hard and fast rules. I'm going to say that again. There's no one right way to blog and there are no hard and fast rules. I'm hoping that by my sharing that it'll give you a little bit of breathing room. Now the project for this class is huge. Putting together a site, putting together your blog, writing posts, all of that is a lot of work. But I've designed this class so that you'll be prepared for all of that. There's a detailed planning guide and there are exercises throughout the class to get you planning, to get you thinking, to get you doing research, to set you up for success, and then to measure your success along the way. Make sure you go to the Projects and Resources tabs for this class and download the handouts. There's the blog planning worksheet and also another handout where you can take notes and find all the links. But first, before we get started on anything I want you to relax, follow clear as lead, and relax. Take a deep breath and know that you've got this. Blogs are creative, blogs are personal and when you're the blogger, you are the boss. A couple of things this class won't do. I'm not going to tell you any hard and fast rules. I'm also not going to tell you which platform to choose. I'm going to help you choose a platform and make a decision that's right for you. But I'm not going to tell you which one is right because there is no one right platform. Also, I'm not going to go into technical details of building your site, there are many other resources that will do that for you. My blog is created with Squarespace. I know how to do that, but if your blog is on WordPress or Wix or blogger, any of those others, my technical know-how is not going to help you. We're not going to cover that. Also, one thing I'm not going to be talking about is making money with your blog because that's not the focus here. Yes, a blog can be a wonderful part of your business and your brand and be a wonderful marketing tool but I'm not going to tell you how to make money, that's not part of this class. I've poured so much effort and love into these lessons that I really hope will empower you to create something that's authentically you. If you're ready to dive in, I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Is Blogging Dead?: I've been blogging for over 12 years and I love blogging, but I also love blogs. I love getting glimpses into other people's lives. I love seeing other parts of the world. I love learning about different creative processes and seeing into people's studios. I love seeing what people create, and learning new things, and reading posts that are uplifting, and inspiring, and encouraging. Blogs are wonderful for that. Blogs are a wonderful way to create community and to make connections. As an introvert, it's a perfect way for me to connect with a lot of people in a way that's comfortable for me. I can even do it in my pajamas. I might not feel comfortable in a room full of hundreds of people sharing my ideas and my stories, but with a blog, no problem. I'm thinking you probably feel the same way or you wouldn't be here. But you may have heard somewhere along the line that blogs are dead. That blogs are so old school or old-fashioned. People have been saying this for years. If you do a search for, is blogging dead, you can see there are some suggestions including date specific. There are many articles discussing opinions of why some people say that blogging has changed, how it's changed. No one's really saying that it's dead. If you spend some time reading these articles, it's really interesting to see the conversations around this topic. The first instance I saw that was in 2013, almost 10 years ago, people have been saying blogging is dead for 10 years and yet here it is, it's still going strong. There are still new blogs. I've seen more people turning to blogs or giving more attention to their blogs as they get dissatisfied with social media. I've heard more and more artists who are uncomfortable on Instagram. More and more artists who are stepping away from social media. If this is a new conversation for you, just Google, artists quitting Instagram, and you'll see lots of opinions from people, lots of blog posts about why people are quitting Instagram, why they're stepping away, what has happened to their art and their business after stepping away. It's a really big topic and there's a lot of conversations going on right now. If you want to dig deeper into the topic of artists and Instagram. In the fall of 2021, I quit Instagram and there's lots of reasons for that which I won't go into here. I shared my decision on my blog and the posts that I've talked about Instagram and stepping away from that platform have gotten so much engagement from my readers. Just a quick look at my post here on my blog where I announced I was quitting Instagram. This is such a hot topic and what I wrote resonated with so many people. I got emails from people. I still have people reaching out to me and the post itself had 45 comments. So many people have connected with me because I've shared my feelings around social media that I know it's a topic that a lot of people are thinking about. Blogging gives you this wonderful personal way to make connections, to share your art, to market yourself in ways that are authentic and beautiful and you can do sales in a non-salesy, non-spammy way with a blog. You can connect with your customers, you can connect with your students. You can make real authentic connections and that's one of the things that I love most about blogging is, the community of blogs and blogging and that community might not be as vibrant as it once was, but it's still there. It takes all of us to be participants in that and that's one of the reasons I really want to teach this class because I think we need more authentic ways to connect with one another. I think we need to be able to get glimpses into other ways of doing things and get to see how other people live, and think, and be creative. That's why I'm teaching this class and no, blogs are not dead. Blogs are still very much here and I can't wait to see yours. I'm going to get off my soapbox now and in the next lesson, we're going to talk about why to keep a blog. That is the most important question that you can ask yourself, more important than anything else, and it's really the way that you can be successful. I'll see you there. 4. Why Blog?: Before you can decide how to blog and what to blog about. You need to figure out your own personal, why. That's worth saying again before you can decide how to blog and what to blog about, you need to figure out your own personal, why. Maybe you already have an idea of why you want to keep a blog, or maybe that's a little more vague. I'm hoping that this lesson will help you to clarify your ideas. It's so important that you know why you're blogging because that will allow you to set yourself up for success. One word of warning, if you are wanting to keep a blog only because you think you should. I hope you'll take a step back and look at your reasons and see if you can come up with something that's a little bit more personal and that has a little bit more of a drive behind it. Because if you don't have your own personal reason, it'll be so hard for you to be consistent and to stay motivated. There are so many wonderful reasons to blog, and I'm sure that you can find your own. Here are some ideas to get you started. Maybe you want to blog as a record of your life or an aspect of it. Maybe you'd write about your art, or your garden or your craft, or your children, or your travels, using your blog as a journal. Or maybe you want to teach something or share your knowledge. What is it that you know how to do that you'd like to pass onto someone else? You could also blog as a creative outlet so just the whole process of creating your site and writing beautiful pieces of writing and sharing art or photography or whatever it is using your blog just to be creative. Or maybe you want to showcase your business or your product, if you have a business, finding a way to market in a comfortable and really authentic way. Along those lines also, you can blog to let your customers or your students or whoever your followers, get to know you, building confidence in you and your brand. You could also use your blog to make connections, so whoever you want to make connections with, is it other artists or customers or students for whoever else you want to make connections with. You might also want to use your blog to inspire people. Maybe like me, you're self-taught and you want to encourage and inspire people to follow their passion and learn something new. Maybe you want to use your blog for marketing and attract new customers or students. You can use your blog to create a creative community or a community of like-minded people or maybe you have some other reasons. If you have other reasons, I'd love to hear about them, so be sure to share them in the class discussion. Or you might have a combination of reasons. Maybe there are a few things on this list and things not mentioned that I'll speak to you. All of those are wonderful, valid reasons for blogging. Your blog can easily be used for more than one reason and maybe your reasons will grow and develop and change as you go along and that's okay. I hope that all of these ideas have gotten you thinking and that you're feeling a little bit more clear on why you want to keep a blog and maybe even a little more excited too. Here here we are at Exercise 1, define your own, personal why. Be sure to download your blog planning worksheet and you can work through the exercises for this class. In the next lesson, we'll be talking about success. I'll see you there. 5. Defining Success: It's so important that before you start, you define success for yourself. Your version of success should be directly related to your why. You need to make sure from the beginning that the two are in line with one another. If you are trying to measure your own success against someone else's definition, you're never going to feel successful and you're going to feel frustrated and disappointed. So being clear from the beginning about what success means to you is so important. Just as there is no one right way to blog and no one right reason to blog, there's no one right definition of success. Getting this all figured out, in the beginning, will really set you up for feeling more confident and feeling more inspired, and it'll help you to stick with your project. But what does success look like? Here are a few ideas to get you started. Maybe success looks like learning a new skill, or maybe you'll feel successful if you grow an engaged following, or make connections with others. Maybe you'll feel successful if you're able to stick with a writing schedule, or if you design a beautiful site. Maybe success means creating an online community, or improving your writing or art. Maybe success will mean elegantly marketing yourself or engaging deeply with your readers. Maybe you'll feel successful if you're able to showcase your work and your skills and do that through your blog and your website. Maybe success means landing art or writing opportunities. Things like commissions or licensing deals, or writing for another blog or a magazine, or whatever other opportunities that come up. Maybe success is something else altogether. You might see that some of these definitions of success may change over time. Once you have designed a beautiful website and you have successfully done that, maybe you'll have another definition of success to follow. You need to figure out your own version of success, and I hope that my list of ideas has you thinking. Spend some time with it, be honest, be realistic with yourself, and don't forget your why. That leads to exercise number 2, what is your definition of success? Remember that your version of success doesn't need to look like anyone else's and that you can't measure your success against someone else's definition. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about different types of blogs and blog posts. 6. Types of Blogs and Posts: Do you already have some favorite blogs that you like to read? If you do, I hope you'll share them in the class discussion because I always love learning about new blogs and I think your fellow classmates will too. In the early days of blogging, blogs often had what were called blogrolls, where they shared a list of their favorite blogs, and that really helped to create a blogging community. You can see here this is Lucy's blog, Attic 24. On her sidebar, she has blogs I love and there's a big list of lots of blogs that she's linking to. I just want to remind you that if you go to the projects and resources for this class, you can download the handout and get links to all of the links that I share throughout class. This is Dana Barbieri's website, Little Butterfly Studio, and a blog is just part of her site. If you go down to her footer, you will see resources. In her resources, there's a list of blogs I love. It's the same kind of thing like a blogroll. On Mary Ann Moss' blog Dispatch from LA, she has a link in her navigation, blogs I love, and there she has her sister, which is so sweet, but here's another list of other recommended blogs. This is a great way to build community, and looking for these sorts of lists on other people's sites is a great way to discover other blogs. Then going back to that post that I shared about stepping away from social media to help with the blogging community, I created my own list of a whole bunch of blogs that I love. We'll spend some time talking about this networking later in the class as well. We talked about defining your why, and the reasons why to keep a blog are as varied as the people who write them. There are blogs on all sorts of topics from car repair, to gardening, to computers, to photography, to cooking, to art, to writing. Just about every topic you can imagine, there's a blog about it. A blog's posts, the types of things they share will correlate directly with the reasons for the blog. The same holds true of how posts are shared. Let's take a look at some different types of blog posts. Blog posts can be long form essays or, on the opposite end, they may be very short. Blog posts can be detailed DIY tutorials or maybe they're made up of lists or include lists within them. Blog posts might be filled with photos and/or art or maybe they're text only and include very few photos. Blogs can be written as comics. They can also review products or review books, or if you're a writer, a blog is a perfect place to share your short stories or your poetry. Maybe you want to include interviews on your blog or pose questions to your readers or have your readers ask you questions and then you can answer those questions in posts. You can run a challenge on your blog. You can also share a roundup of the links. Maybe you have a podcast or a vlog, which is a video blog, and you want to share written versions of that on a blog. As with anything, your blog could be a combination of these or you could do something entirely different. You may already be drawn to one form over another. I'm going to share some examples to get you thinking even more. This is Posie Gets Cozy. It's Alicia Paulson's blog, and it is mostly a journal of everyday life and her creative pursuits and her daughter. There's lots of photos, also large blocks of text, and she also runs a business. Here at the end of this post, there's a shop announcement with new embroidery pattern that she has, so that's one example. Austin Kleon writes a blog and here's an example. This is a list of books that he's recommending. It's a book review format with lots of books. This is A Way To Garden. It's Margaret Roach's blog and it's her podcast blog. There's notes about the podcast. There's also the full written text of her conversations and she includes photos in here. You can also listen to the episode. It's nice to be able to have photos to go along with a podcast, I think. This Reading My Tea Leaves, this is Erin Boyle's blog, and this post is My Week In Objects. This is a list that's made up of photos and then a short description of the photo. This is Rachel Awes. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. This is her blog, and here's a post that's just a little comic and then there's just a short note from her. That's another way you can do a blog post. Cherry Heart is the blog of Sandra Paul, and this blog also is linked with a podcast. But instead of the full text of the podcast, it's just show notes. There's not many photos, just that top photo for this one. That's another way to do a podcast-related blog post. This post from Bonnie Christine is five easy DIY Christmas gifts, and it's a link roundup with photos and the links are all to other projects on her blog. That's a great way to drive traffic to some of your older posts. You can do a roundup of your posts, whether it's project or whatever else you want to share in a roundup like that. Quince & Co that's a yarn shop has a blog post that is a tutorial for some knitting techniques, and it includes detailed step-by-step instructions with photos and text. There's an example of a DIY post that's very involved with all of the steps for these different types of knitting techniques. You can do DIY tutorials about just about anything. Here's another company's blog. This is Mountain Rose Herbs, and their post is how to make tortillas with nettles. This is a recipe, a different take on a tutorial. There are lots and lots of recipe blogs out there, and it's another great example of how a blog can be a wonderful component of your business. Here's this photo that goes on Pinterest. They've got that there. It's a great marketing tool. This is Alisa Burke's blog, and this post is a peek inside her sketchbook. It's just photos from her sketchbook. That's an easy kind of post to create if you are an artist. August Wren is the blog of Jennifer Orkin Lewis, and this post is about how she stores her artwork. It's a behind the scenes in her studio, posts with lots of photos, and she talks about how she decided on this storage method for her artwork. Here's a post on Little Truths Studio blog. This is Lori Robert's blog, and it's a tour of her art studio, how she transformed her garage to be a studio. There's before and after pictures, photos showing the construction. Everyone always loves to peek inside other artists' studios, and this is a great example. She even details the expenses and has lots and lots of nice photos. There, her dogs in the garage studio with her. It ends with another photo that could go on Pinterest, and here's one more example on the Doodlewash blog. This one is by Charlie O'Shields. This is a group of blog, and that post was for World Watercolor Month. During World Watercolor Month, he posted everyday, and this is a big challenge. There's a prompt for each day of the month. It's a great example of how to encourage engagement. If you've ever taken a writing class, you've probably heard that one of the best ways to learn how to write is to read a lot, and I would say that this holds true for blogs too. One of the best ways to learn how to be a blogger and how to be a good blogger is to read a lot of good blogs. I hope you're beginning to get some ideas of what you want to write about. In the next lesson, we'll dig a little deeper. 7. What to Write About: Now that we've thought about different types of blogs and reasons to keep blogs, I want you to think a little bit more about what you might want to write about. Again, we're going to go back to our why. Always, always, always, you need to start with your why. Then when you're thinking about what to write about, you should also consider your audience, which we haven't really talked much about. But let's dig a little deeper with that. I'm going to take a look at each of the possible why's that I talked about earlier and think about maybe what sort of audience would apply for that. If your why is to keep a blog as a record of your life or an aspect of it, maybe your audience is your future self, or maybe it's your children, or your family, or your friends. If your why is to teach something or to share your knowledge, you should think about who might want to learn what you have to teach, and those people will be your audience. If you want to blog solely as a creative outlet, it's possible that your audience might not be as important as the act of blogging. If your why is to showcase your business or your products, your audience is probably your customers or your future customers. Similarly, if your why is to let your customers or your students get to know you, your audience would be your students and/or your customers. If your why is to make connections, you need to ask yourself with who do you want to make those connections, and that would be your audience. To figure out who your audience would be if your why is to inspire others, you need to consider how and in what ways you want to inspire. If your why is to attract new customers or students, your audience would be potential customers or students and you need to ask who wants what you're selling or who wants to learn what you're teaching. What if your why is to create community? In that case, you need to consider what kind of community you want to create and who would want to be a part of it, and those people would be your audience. Then finally, if you have other reasons or a combination of reasons to figure out your audience, you need to consider who would benefit from what you have to share. You can also share your why in the class discussion, and I can take a look at it if you're having trouble thinking of an audience and give you some ideas. Hopefully your other classmates will give their ideas as well. All of this thinking will help you to discover your niche. Think of your niche as the umbrella category of your blog. Only you can determine how narrow a niche you want. The more narrow your niche, the more specific your audience. But I want you to also give yourself some leeway because people are not niche. Here's an example from the Holly and Flora blog, that's Jayme Marie Henderson's blog. It's mostly recipes of cocktails, but here she has a post about her wedding. She's sharing photos from her wedding. By doing this, she can connect with her readers in a really human way. Let's go even deeper and talk about some more types of posts that you can write. Here are some ideas to get you started. You could share the story of a particular project, your creative process or rituals, your creative workspace, your favorite tools, supplies, or books. You could share ideas for styling or using your art and/or your products. You could host giveaways or exchanges or swaps. You could share a sketchbook flip-through. You could do posts of frequently asked questions. You could share your story, what your background is. You could write about where and how you find inspiration. You can host a challenge like we saw with Doodlewash. You could write tutorials for specific projects or techniques. You could have an interview with another artist or other business person or someone in your niche. You could share your personal struggles. You could write a personal essay that shares insights or inspirations. Really, you can write about anything else you might want to share. You can also look to your favorite blogs for different types of post ideas, or if you do some searching online, search blog post ideas for and there's writers, photographers, all sorts of different ideas you can look at and find articles. Here's 103 blocking topics. Here is a list of 50, another 52, here's another 50. If you do a little more research, you can come up with many more ideas. Once you begin thinking about this and begin brainstorming, I think you will quickly come up with many, many ideas. All of this leads to our next exercises. For Exercise 3, you're going to ask the question, who is your audience? Then for Exercise 4, answer the question, what is your niche? Then for Exercise 5, you're going to begin creating a master list of post ideas. You can use the planning guide to begin building your list of ideas for blog topics. What I do for myself, I like paper, I like using paper. I have lists all over the place and I have Post-it Notes, but I also have a notebook where I just keep all of my ideas. If I'm brainstorming or writing a list on another piece of paper, I can slip it in there. You can see I can stick my Post-it Notes on there, too, and that way I keep everything in one place. If you're more of a digital planner, maybe you want to use an app or whatever works for you to keep track of your ideas. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about something I get a lot of questions about from aspiring bloggers. Can you guess what it is? 8. Choosing a Platform: Did you guess that one of the questions I get the most from aspiring bloggers is, what platform to choose? Maybe you're wondering that very same question. There is no perfect, one size fits all best platform. That's why I'm not going to be recommending one. You must choose the best platform for you. Choosing a platform doesn't need to be stressful or complicated. You need to think about a few certain criteria. The first thing you need to think about is your budget. How much money, if any, can you afford to spend on your blog? It's going to be a determining factor for what platforms you would be able to use. There are some that are free, so if you have no money to spend on your blog, then you're going to need to choose one of those. Then you need to think about what features you need. Do you need it to be easy to use where you don't need to know any code? That's important to know from the beginning. What sorts of pages do you want to have for your blog if you need any in addition to the blog page itself? Will you want to have a shop? Does the platform offer email, or a custom domain, or do you need to purchase either of those separately? What sorts of security does the site provide? This is especially important if you have customer data. What about customer service? If you have a problem, will there be someone who you can reach out to who will be able to answer your question? You may want a platform that has attractive and functional templates, especially if you aren't someone who's going to be doing your own coding. You'll also want to think about the reputation of the platform. You can look up reviews and things like that to help you determine what the reputation is. Once you've figured out your budget and you figured out what features you'd need for your blog, then I'd recommend doing a little bit of research. New platforms are coming out all the time and the features that different platforms offer are changing constantly. That's true also about the pricing. I'm not going to include specific prices or talk about specific platforms here. Instead, I'll give you some ideas on how to research for yourself to figure out the most current information. Do some searching, look up best blogging platforms. You can get very specific if you want to choose your niche or the type of blog that you'll be writing. Let's narrow this down to best blogging platforms for artists, and we can see what comes up. Your search may look different. I would say skip the ads at the top, and then look at some of the articles and see what people are saying. I would look at more than one. Skip around and see. You could also do a specific search for best free blogging platforms if you are looking for one you don't have to pay for. Again, I'd skip the ads and read some of these articles. Definitely read more than one and see what's occurring on list after list. You could also search for blog platform comparisons. Some of these articles will take two platforms side-by-side and compare all of their features. When you know what features you want, you can line those up and see what's going to work best for you. Another great way to figure out a platform to use is to do a little bit of detective work. Take a look at the blogs that you like to read or the blogs that you really think are beautiful, and figure out what platform they're using. Sometimes it's really obvious and sometimes it's not. I'll show you how to figure it out. Here is Sara Torbett's blog, The Rosy Life. This one is easy to figure out because the name, the URL tells you right there, therosylife.blogspot.com. You can also see the favicon has the BlogSpot logo, and then if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, what theme it is, and it says Powered by Blogger. That was an easy one to figure out. This is Little Cotton Rabbits from Julie, and if you look in the URL, it says Typepad. That one was another one that's easy to figure out. This is Aleta Jacobson's blog. Right there, you can see that it is a WordPress blog in the favicon. It doesn't say that in her URL. But if you scroll down, we're going to go through this post down to the bottom of the page. It says Powered by WordPress. This is Petal Plum. You can see the favicon is a Squarespace. It's like a little black cube. If we scroll down, she is a teacher, and she designs websites, and she's a member of the Squarespace circle. So that's why it's down there. Here's awoodennest.com. I don't see it in their favicon, I don't see it in the URL. Let's figure out what this is. We can go up to View and then Developer and View Source. This is in Chrome, and you can look right here, it says this is Squarespace in the code. It's right there. If you do a little peek behind the scenes. If you're using Firefox, it's a little different. You go up here to Tools, and then Browser Tools, and Web Developer Tools. Click on that. Here is your code. You can poke around in the code. Sometimes it takes a little bit of looking. But here, Squarespace right there in the code. Here's another example. We saw this cherry heart blog already. If you look, it's not obvious. They have their own favicon, they have their own custom domain. But let's go look in the code, so View Source. Then, right here you can see it's a BlogSpot blog. Look at Mary and Moss's blog Dispatch From LA. It's not obvious in the favicon, it's not obvious in the name. Let's do a little bit of poking around. Go up to View, Developer, View Source. Here's the code. Let's poke around here up. It is a WordPress blog. Here is little truth studio. Laurie Roberts blog. It's not in the favicon, it's not in the name. Down here you can see site by Aeolidia, but it doesn't say what platform. We'll take a look at the code and hunt around here. This is a Shopify website. That tells you in the code that this is Shopify. I know that Aeolidia specializes in Shopify. This is acatchoflight.com. This is my cousin Sarah's blog, and it's not obvious in the favicon, it's not obvious in the URL, so let's look at the code. We look in here and poke around and look, this is a Wix blog. Doing a little detective work, poking around in the blogs you've read will give you one more tool for determining what's right for you. This leads to the next exercise, which is choosing a platform. For Exercise 6, you need to ask yourself first, what is your budget? Then you need to figure out which features do you want or do you need. You're going to research the best platforms and check which platforms the blogs you admire use. Then after you do all of those things, you can decide which platform is right for you. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about styling and formatting your site. 9. Styling and Formatting Your Blog: We've looked at a lot of examples of blogs already, and hopefully, you have looked at some blogs yourself as well. You may already be thinking about what you want to have on your site and whether you want pages other than just the blog or maybe you already have a website and you're adding your blog to it. One thing I want you to keep in mind is how important it is that your site be easy to navigate. Ease of navigation is the most important factor of your site design. Let's talk a little bit more about navigation. Here are some questions to ask. Is it clear whose blog this is, and what it's about? Is it clear how to move from one post to another? Is it clear how to move from one page to another? Is it easy to understand what each page is about? Is there a search function? Are posts categorized, and can you browse the categories? Is there a way to subscribe? Is there a way to contact the blogger? Now what about what your site looks like in terms of all of the design details? One of the most important things to think about are your fonts. Here are some things to think about when you're choosing fonts. Choose an easy to read font for body text. This font that I'm using here for all of the bullet points would not be a good choice for long passages of text, it's just not easy enough to read. Use Only a few different fonts. You might want a different font for your headings from the font you use for your body, and maybe you'll want to use a different font for your navigation, or maybe you want one more for high-impact text, something like for your logo, for example. You wouldn't want to have more fonts than this because it would just make things too busy. Something else to keep in mind is that you should keep your color simple, comfortable on the eye, and easy to read. Don't have too many colors all jumbled together, or choose something like neon green for your body text because it's just too hard to read. You want to choose sizes that are easy to read, so not too big or too small. Use fonts, types and sizes, to clarify your hierarchy. That would be with headings. If there's a post title, you'll want that bigger than your body text. If there are specific points you really want the reader to take away or to catch their eye if they're scanning through the piece, you want to use a heading for that. The font you choose for your headings are usually larger and have a higher impact than your body text. You want to make sure that the fonts and the colors fit with and convey your brand. This isn't something that's necessarily very easy to quantify, something more that you feel. Imagine that your blog is whimsical and you share a fantasy art. You're going to want to choose fonts that will convey that message. Often, fonts are part of a template. If you're using a platform that has templates, you just have to make sure you choose one that fits for you. Now let's look at some site examples. Let's look at The Postman's Knock. This is Lindsey Bugbee's site. Here you can see a fancy font for their logo, and right here at the top, there's a post, Read Me First. You have these navigation categories. They've got their catalog that has a drop-down menu. There's more options up here, including a login, frequently asked questions. All these other little navigation symbols, including some social message here at the top, a shop announcement, it's clear right away whose blog this is and what it's about. Here's a place to subscribe. If you scroll down, you can see more posts and it has a continue reading. The whole post is not there on the main site. You have to click to get the whole thing. In the sidebar, there are some categories. If you look here, there's a little bio, so we know whose site this is. There's a search function up at the top along with a cart because there's a shop here as well. We scroll down and look at these categories. You click on one of them, it takes you to all the posts that are about that topic, and again, they're arranged like the main site with a Continue Reading button. At the bottom here, you can sign up for their newsletter, you can also select posts by date. There are a few ways to choose what posts you want to read, and that arranges them by date. You can take a look at these other fonts. That's the fancy font. These other ones are more simple. It's pretty easy to read and easy to navigate. This next site is Roben Marie's blog. She's a tech savvy artist. It says that in her logo here. When we take a look, she has some navigation at the very top of her site, and then here is the navigation for the blog. You can look at her posts by category. You can also sign up right here at the top. Her blog has the posts arranged in thumbnails with the titles, and so you click on the thumbnail to get the whole post. This is a podcast video that's in this one. Not all of them are podcasts. If you look at some of these titles, you can see what other things she writes about. Here is another place to subscribe for her newsletter, and then there's more navigation at the bottom. It's pretty straightforward, easy to see, easy to navigate. This is the blog of mother and daughter company, Under a Tin Roof. You have the navigation at the top, home about visit blog, and then if you scroll down, this is the homepage. You can see the recent posts, there's a place to subscribe. There's some Instagram posts there. If we click on the blog, there's categories in the drop-down menu of the blog. The posts are very large thumbnails that you can click on to get to the post, and there's a title, also some categories within that information for your post. Very large photos, large text for the post titles. You can search here at the bottom. There's a blog archive down here with dates. This one looks a lot different than the other ones we've been seeing, but it has a lot of the same elements. If you click on the photo, it'll take you to the posts, like we saw in the last blog. Again here, the styling is very clear and it looks different than what we've seen before. This is Tiny Happy, which is Melissa Wastney blog, and you can see the URL and the title of the blog are slightly different. This one looks a lot different than the other ones we took a look at. There are sidebars and the posts are right in the center of those sidebars. Instead of having thumbnails, you have the whole posts. There's no read more link. You don't have to click on a title. It's just one post after another. You scroll through and can read each and every post. As you scroll down, the sidebars disappear because they're only there at the top. We go back up here at the top. You can see what's in the sidebars. There are links to specific posts. These are tutorials. You have the archives over here. There's a search. There's links to shop. If you click on one of those posts in the sidebar, it takes you right to the post. This is a different styling that we've seen before, and that just scratches the surface. There are lots of different ways to style your blog. We've talked about navigation, we've talked a bit about fonts and branding. The next thing I want to talk about is how to format the posts themselves. Here's some questions to ask yourself when you're thinking about formatting your blog posts. How are the photos and text arranged on the page? How many photos are included in each post? As I'm sure you've already noticed and can guess, this can vary greatly. Even within the same blog, different posts may have different numbers of photos. How large are the photos? I'd recommend it's best to be consistent with your sizes. How much text is there? Again, post length can vary within your blog. Is the text broken up into small blocks or is it dense? How are headings used in the posts and throughout the site? We've talked about that a little bit, but it's good to think about when you're looking at sites and when you're arranging your own. Do your posts include lists? Can readers comment or otherwise interact? Is there a like button or something like that? Let's take a look at some single posts from some blogs and think about these things in a little more detail. This is the Floret blog. We are on a single post here. This is rose story part 1. There's the title of the post with the date, large photograph at the top. It says written by the Floret on the one side and then there's a sidebar on the other side that has some more information, where you can sign up, her books are there. Then the post has lots of photos and lots of text. Sometimes there's one photo and then some texts, sometimes there's a couple of photos and then some text, a couple of paragraphs. But there's a lot of both photos and text in this very long post. The photos are mostly, I think they're all horizontal. Looks like they're all horizontal and there are a lot of them. It's a long, long post. A lot different than that short one that we looked at earlier, that little comic. Here we are at the bottom, there's 151 comments. This is a very popular blog with a very active readership. This next blog is Tara Leaver's blog. There's your logo at the top. We are inside one of her posts right now. There's her navigation, her sidebar with her bio. There's a pop-up to ask you to subscribe. That's another way to get people to subscribe to your newsletter. Then her post starts with a photo. It looks like it's a shareable Pinterest photo. Then here's her post. It's broken up into small sections and there's some numbered headings. She has different sizes of headings. She has some lists with bullet points. This is a very scannable post. Then she has a planner that you can download. Here are some more posts you may also like, and she has two comments. We'll look at one more blog. This is the aesthetics of joy. It's Ingrid Fetell Lee's blog. She's got a sidebar here. This is the post with some categories at the top that's in a different color. Then here is a photo, and the rest of the post is all text. It's a lot of text. She does have headings, very large text that'll catch your eye so you get the main idea, even if you don't read the whole thing. This is another pop-up for her newsletter and it has a free gift. Then down here, there are some share links and then see more with more links. Then there are 15 comments. Now, I don't want you to get hung up on comments and think that that's a measure of how good or bad a site is or how large the readership is. It really varies a lot. Some blogs just don't get a lot of comments. Something else you should keep in mind is mobile formatting. That's formatting for things like phones and tablets. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when I'm on my laptop, the formatting of site will look a little bit different than it does on my desktop computer? Mobile formatting makes it easy for you to interact with the site no matter what device you're using. You need to ask, is the site formatted for mobile devices? You're going to want your blog to be formatted for mobile devices. You're going to look at how the photos look on a phone or tablet. Are they distorted? Are they the right size? Do they get cut off? How about the text? Is it readable on a phone or tablet? Is it too large? Is it really small? You also want to ask, do all the features work on a phone or tablet? Having your site be mobile optimized not only helps the people who are coming to your site, but it makes sure that your site performs well in searches. Google will penalize any site that is not optimized for mobile devices, so I think it's a very important consideration. Most platforms I think have that built-in capability. But it's something to keep in mind and something to take a look at. I know that with Squarespace, which is what I use for my site, sometimes I don't always like exactly how things look when it's mobile formatted so I go in and tinker with things. There are some settings that you can change. For your own platform, I'd suggest taking a look into that. All this talk about your styling and formatting leads right into the next exercise. You're going to begin planning the general format of your blog site. You're going to think about how many pages you'll need. If you need some help thinking about what types of pages you might need for your site and you're an artist, I have a class called the beginner's guide to launching your artist's website that will get you thinking about that. You also need to think about what to include in sidebars if you even want to use them. How to arrange your posts by category? Basically, what is it that you want to write about? Will you use photos and/or other art in your posts or will it all be text? Then how long do you want your posts to be? Again, they don't have to all be the same length. What features or design elements don't you like? That's important to keep in mind too. Then investigate templates for your platform. There are lots of pre-made templates, some that are right there in your platform, some that you can purchase separately. Another option is to have a designer design something for you. You want to think about all those things and what is possible for your platform. You want to think about whether you want readers to be able to comment or otherwise interact with your site. Then it's helpful to describe your blog in one or two sentences. This helps you get very clear about your blog. It's also great to use as a tagline. If we go back to The Postman's Knock, you can look over here in her little bio. It says The Postman's Knock is a blog focused on teaching creative techniques and offering guides to learning modern calligraphy and illustration. It's very clear for everyone visiting what this blog is about. In the next lesson, we're going to shift gears a bit and I'm going to talk about a practice that will help you to be successful blogging on a regular basis. I'll see you there. 10. Creating a Content Calendar: I said there are no hard and fast rules for blogging. But if you want to grow an audience and gain traction for your blog, one of the best things you can do, is be consistent. How often do you need to publish a new post? Some bloggers blog multiple times a week. Other blog publish new posts only once a week, or once a month, or only when they have something to say. You're going to have to figure out what works best for you. It can be helpful before you start blogging to write a whole post and see how long that takes you, and then figure out how much time you have to devote to this. Of course, the longer you blog, the easier it will get, so we'll probably go a lot quicker once you have a rhythm and you've gotten the hang of it. But it's really good to be realistic with yourself, and be able to set a goal that you'll stick with. Because the best schedule is the one you can commit to and stick with. Choose a schedule for posting and stick to it. Now having a whole bunch of ideas of what to write about, really serve you well if you want to consistently show up. By the way, I've gotten questions about what day of the week is best, what time of the day is best to put up your posts. It doesn't matter. Your readers will read your blog at their convenience, so do whatever works for you. One thing that'll help you be successful with sticking to a schedule, is having a content calendar. I know that sounds fancy or technical. What it really means is, figuring out what you want to post when. For my own business, I get a big calendar like this, and I fill in all of my projects. It's also helpful to look at the calendar to help you plan your blog posts. For each month, you want to note any seasonal ideas or topics, that are relevant for your niche. You also want to pay attention to important holidays, and events, that are important to you, or your audience. Then also note special projects and offerings that you might have planned. If you're releasing a new painting collection, you may want to do a post related to that. Then finally, you want to note any vacations, time that you need to take off, and any personal or life commitments. This will help you know what time you have available, and what time you don't. It's up to you whether you want to take time off your blog, when you're going on vacation, or if you want to plan ahead, and have a post ready to go up while you're gone. Looking at the calendar, or looking at what's going on, once you do that, spend some time also looking at your master list of blog post ideas. You've got your calendar, you've got your list, you can look at the two of them and see where things overlap, and that can give you ideas of what to post when. You may also want to think about writing posts in series. Some possible series ideas include interviews, book reviews, questions and answers, product reviews, favorite supplies, or something else that's unique to you. Maybe there's something that's really specific to you, your life, or your practice. For me, last year I began posting every third Friday, a tour of my garden. I knew that every third Friday, the blog would be garden-related. That helped me structure everything else. Let's take a look at some examples. In the sketchbook school blog, they have something called Draw Tip Tuesday, and that's a series that goes up on Tuesdays, that shares drawing tips. That's a serious specific to them. On Karen Lowry Reed's blog, sewandsowlife, she's been sharing a series of triptych posts, and these are posts that have three photos, usually with not much text. If you remember this post on reading my tea leaves, Erin Boyle has a series of my week and objects. That's another example of a blogger-specific series. Then this is maybe a mix and it's a taking stock blog post. For this series, she uses a list of words, and those words form the structure of her blog post. She even has a blank list so that people can do their own lists. This is a great way to create community, which we'll talk about in another lesson. On Carlos blog, The River, she shares joy list Monday posts, where she shares a list of things that are bringing her joy, and that's actually a series that I had started, and I'm so glad that she took it over. Then here's an example of one of my garden tours. Has lots of photos of my garden, and some of my art. Then this one also had a video. Thinking about your ideas, what you want to share, and looking at the calendar, and all of that will help you begin getting clearer on how often you post as well as what you're going to be posting. Here's our next exercise. Begin planning the content calendar for your blog. In the next lesson, I'm going to talk about developing your voice. 11. Developing Your Voice: We've really covered a lot so far, and in some ways, I've only scratched the surface. But I hope that you're beginning to get excited about planning and creating your blog, about doing some more research, and really digging in deep with this. I want to remind you that your blog will only be as good as the effort you put into it, so take your time with this, and remember to have fun. We've already talked about what you might want to write about. Now I think maybe you should consider how you want to write. Maybe you already have a very strong writing voice, maybe you're very confident with your writing, and even if you're not, it's a good idea to think about how you want your writing to be perceived. Do you want to be perceived as an expert? Or is your voice that of a curious observer? Do you want your writing to be seen as joyful, or dreamy, or sarcastic, or funny, or pessimistic, or emotional, or strong, or conflicted, or in awe, or relaxed, or friendly, or something else altogether? It's good to keep all of this in mind before you start writing, and while you're writing. It's important to consider your audience and what style of writing will resonate with your audience when you're thinking about your voice. Will a formal style resonate with them? Or maybe more casual? Does your audience want to read technical writing, and writing filled with specialized jargon? All of these things are important to keep in mind. How do you develop your voice and your confidence? The secret is practice. One of the best things that you can do to improve your writing is to write a lot and to read a lot. Not only reading blogs but read all other writing. Picking up a writing book might be a good idea too. That will help improve your voice. You might also want to take some writing classes, and there are some wonderful ones out there, lots of them here on Skillshare as well. Improving your art and your photography will also help with your blog. Maybe you want to take some classes with that, but even just paying attention to the imagery that you post, if you're posting imagery. Doing things like adjusting brightness, and making sure that there is a clear focus for your imagery will really help. For the next exercise, I want you to describe the voice or tone you want to use in your blog. Now, you don't have to have this entirely figured out right away, and your voice will probably develop as you write, but it's important to think about even in the beginning.In the next lesson, I'll take you through my process for writing a post from start to finish. 12. Creating and Polishing Posts: I thought it would be helpful for you to look at my process for putting together a post. Now the technical details will be dependent on your platform. But in terms of writing and editing and creating a post that will really engage with your audience, that will be applicable no matter what your platform. The first step is to start with the idea. I've encouraged you to create a big list of all your post ideas. Pick one of those ideas and you're going to think about what the post is going to be about. Then ask yourself, do I already know what I want to say? Maybe you do, maybe you're still figuring it out, maybe you need to do some research. Also, which will come up first, the writing or the imagery? Sometimes the writing comes first, sometimes the imagery will come first. I'll show you some examples from my blog. For this post, 10 ways to invite more ease into your days and why it matters. I started with the writing. I wrote this first and found the images to go with my post after I had finished all the writing. Then for this post, how to discover joy in subtle colors lessons from the winter garden, the imagery came first and I wrote the post afterwards. This was some new paintings that I had painted and some photographs in my studio, and I wanted to write about them. I started with the imagery first and I wrote the post afterwards. The next step is to write a rough draft. I almost always do this by hand on paper first. It keeps me from getting distracted by other things on my computer and it helps me to avoid trying to be too neat in editing as I go. My rough drafts are pretty rough, they're pretty messy, and they're a great place to start. I usually let my rough draft sit for a day, and then I'll come back to it and type it into Squarespace as a draft blog post. While I'm typing, I will edit as I go, maybe switch things around, change up the sentences, whatever needs to be done, and I will add in my photos. I use Grammarly to help me edit my blog posts as I go. I just have the free service from them. It's a plugin for your browser and you can read more about how Grammarly works if you're interested. It's really helpful for picking up any grammar mistakes that I didn't catch for spelling errors, and the free service works perfectly fine. Here is in process in Squarespace while I'm working on a post. You can see it gives you some suggestions. It underlines things and tells you, it really loves commas I've found, and I often ignore some of their suggestions because some of the commas aren't really necessary. But it's really up to you what your grammar style is. As you write, it'll come up with any spelling errors or things that need to be hyphenated that you've missed. It's a great way to catch things that you otherwise wouldn't catch even with proofreading because sometimes you can't catch everything. I want to touch on photos for a moment. How you upload your photos will be platform specific, but there are a few general things to keep in mind. First is size. You don't want your photos to be too big or it'll slow down your site, and that will penalize you in search. I'd say no more than 500 kilobytes. Related to that is resolution. Web resolution for photos is 72 DPI. Then color mode. In order for your photos to look good on a screen, you want them to be RGB. That's true for actual photographs or if you have photos of your art or JPEGs of your art. You want them to be RGB, otherwise, the color will look off on the Internet. Finally, I want to talk a little bit about SEO, and that means search engine optimization. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, but in terms of photos and SEO, you want to give your photos keywords in your title of the photo, then your caption in your description, and if there's a place to add any tags for your photo. That's really going to be platform specific, how and where you'll put SEO keywords in for your photos. But it's important to keep in mind, having those keywords in place tells computers what's in the photo. If someone who's vision impaired comes to your site and they have software that reads the pages out, they'll be able to know what's in the photographs, but it's also very important for search. SEO, search engine optimization. This is a huge, huge topic, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this in part because SEO is very dependent on your platform and what's available for your platform. I would recommend going into the help section of your platform. I'm hoping that there's a help section. I can show you, this is a Squarespace help section. If I search for SEO, there are a lot of results that come up, articles that will give me information on how I can work on SEO for my site. Hopefully, there'll be some resources like that for your platform. I'd recommend spending a little bit of time researching that so you know what is the best practices for your platform to help you get found in search. Because that's really what SEO is about, getting your site found by people who are searching for exactly what you have to offer. The better you are at describing what you're offering, the more easily they'll find your site. That leads me into the next step of the process, and that is to write the post title. Blog post titles are probably the most important part of your post, and paying attention to your title is one of the best things you can do to help with search engine optimization. It's one of the first things that will catch your reader's attention too. Ask yourself some questions. What is the post about? Then think of keywords and possible search phrases that people might be using if they're looking for information on the topic you're writing about. Next, think about what type of post is it. Is it a how to post? If so, you'll want to use how to in the title probably. Is it a recipe post? You might want to use the word recipe in the title. Are you sharing a list of tips or suggestions? Then you might want to use a number in the title. Try to use emotional words to connect with your readers. In your post, is there a twist that might grab your reader's attention? Then you'll also want to think how else might you grab your reader's attention. No, not every post will land itself to a title that brings you to the top of Google search, which is your goal with good SEO. But it helps to pay attention to every single title. Blend titles are titles that don't say anything about what the post is about won't capture your reader's attention. Just imagine, if you got email with the post title in your inbox, would it be an email that you'd want to click and open or would you just delete it? I want to show you a tool I use to help me improve my titles. It's called Headline Studio and I use the free version. You can test your title and it'll give you a score and show you what you could improve. It also has some inspiring articles and it'll give you some ideas for how to write some titles. Here are a few articles that you can read that will help to improve your titles. Let's take a look at it in action. You can see that it shows the last three versions of the title. After that, it's blocked unless you have the paid version. You can see how I switched around the words a bit to try and get a higher score, and I ended up with a title that had an 84 score. It scores you on these different types of words: common, uncommon, emotional, and power. It also scores you on things like word balance, word count, character count, headline type, reading level, sentiment, clarity, and skim ability. It gives you suggestions for how to improve all of those. I found it to be very helpful when I'm thinking about titles. After I write the title, I let my post sit and then I edit it one last time. To do that, I'll first read-through for clarity and fix anything that's unclear or maybe clunky. I'll ask myself again, does the opening grab attention? So you don't want your first couple of sentences to be boring or else you'll lose your reader. I'll go through and omit needless words or anything that I repeat. Where possible, I'll use headings for ease of reading and scanning and to help break up the text. I'll also look at all of my paragraphs and ask, can any of the longer paragraphs be cut into shorter sections? That helps with scalability and makes the page look less daunting to your reader. Then I will add tags and categories to my post and check the tags and titles of the photos one last time. That's all SEO stuff. I'll finalize all of the SEO, and finally, I will publish my post. That was a lot packed into one lesson, but I hope that learning about my process will help you figure out your own process and what will work for you. The next exercise is optional, and that's to sign up for Grammarly and Headline Studio. There are links to these in the links handout, so you can go right to those. I'm not an affiliate and I use the free versions. I just wanted to share them with you because I think they could be helpful. They helped me with my posts and I hope they'll help you too. For Exercise 11, I want you to write a blog post. If you don't have your site setup, that's okay. You can just write a draft of your post and gather imagery that you'd like to use if you want to use any imagery. The whole process will help you, especially when you are trying to decide how often you should post. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about growing your audience. 13. Growing Your Audience: You've put together your blog, you've designed your site, you've begun creating content that you're posting on a regular basis. Now what? How do you get your readers to find your writing? Now this is a huge topic and it's something that's going to take time. So I want you to be patient with it. There are so many ways for you to get the word out about your blog, but I thought I'd share a few ideas to get you thinking. Tell your friends and family about your blog. I know that maybe sounds silly, but lots of bloggers start out with their moms being their first and number 1 reader. You may also want to add your blog link to your email signature. Every time you send out an email, someone has the chance to click on a link to your blog. If you're on social media and that's your thing, share your blog on social media. Also, I'd recommend claiming your blog on Bloglovin. Bloglovin is a place to discover and follow blogs. I use it myself to follow some blogs, and I've signed up for a daily digest so I get all of the new posts that went out that day emailed in one message. You'll want to claim your blog and that way people can follow you on there. Here's what the page looks like when you're signed in. There are the categories at the top and then the new posts down below. I don't get a lot of traffic from Bloglovin, but I've made some good connections and have found some followers there. It's definitely worth a minute or so to sign up. Make sure you also set up a subscription option for your blog, and this is going to be platform-specific. It's a good idea to invite people to subscribe on your site, and that way if people like what they see, you're going to be able to keep in contact with them. We saw a few examples of this when we were looking at some blogs, including some sites that had popups. Within your posts, I recommend asking readers questions to encourage interaction and comments. It's nice at the end of a post to ask them their opinion about something that you've been talking about, and then make sure you respond to comments. Something else that's a great way to create community and to encourage people to read blogs and visit them is to link to other blogs that you admire and then tell the person that you linked to them. I think every blogger loves hearing that something they wrote connected with you or that you really love their blog, so don't feel shy about reaching out. I'm all about sharing the love, and it always makes me happy when I hear from someone who's gained some new followers because I linked to them. I make sure to let other bloggers know when their links have led to new followers or new business for me as well. So be sure you share the love. We already talked about the old school blog roll and links of favorite blogs. I want to show you a few more examples. Once a week, the Well-Appointed Desk has a post called Link Love, and in it they share links from other bloggers on lots of different creative things. That's a fun way to support one another, and I love that they do that. Last year, Pip of Meet Me at Mike's shared a big list of 100 blogs she loves to read. I think that's a great place to discover some new blogs, and it's another way to grow community and gain followers. This one's a little bit different. Torrie of To Love and To Learn shares what she calls a snapshot of her life, and in it like in some of the posts that we saw before, she has little prompts to form the structure of her post. She has the blank list down at the bottom, and she encourages people to copy and paste those prompts and then link to her if they post them on their blog, which is another wonderful way to encourage the blogging community. Along those lines, I'd recommend that you read and comment on other blogs, and then you can link to yours, but make sure to do it in a non-spammy way. Maybe in a signature or sometimes there's a space in the comment form to put your website because it's all about community. Another idea is to interview or profile other creatives. If you're doing a profile and using someone's images, make sure you only do that with permission. Here are a few examples. First, we're going to look at this interview on the Floret blog. This is an interview with Sarah Raven, and it includes photographs and then written text of the interview. This is a great way to do an interview without having to do any video. You can email the person you're interviewing questions and they can email their answers back to you and any photographs that they want to share, and you're going to make sure to link to them. Down at the bottom here, there's links and then photo credit. So make sure you credit whoever's photos they are. Here on Sarah Greenman's blog, this is an artist's profile of Jane Wright. Here's a picture of the artist, and then a write-up of the person and some photographs of her art. That's an easy way to do it without asking too much of the person that you're profiling. On Roben-Marie Smith's blog, which we saw before, this is an interview with Francisca Nunes. This is a person who is part of their program. There's a video, there is a podcast, and then there's also written questions and answers and photographs of Francisca's art. Maybe you noticed on Sarah Greenman's blog that Jane Wright is part of her e-course. If you have classes, it might be interesting to interview your students, or maybe if you sell products, to interview some of your customers. There are many other ways to do interviews and profiles. Another idea is to submit to be a guest blogger. Some blogs publish posts by other bloggers, so that's another opportunity for you to get the word out about who you are and what you do. Also, you can submit to print publications. It's always fun to see your art and writing in print. Something else you can do is get business cards printed with your URL and give them out to everyone. Especially if they are pretty people, want to keep them, and maybe share them with other people, so that's another great way to get the word out. One last thing I want to mention is to learn more about SEO, search engine optimization, and be deliberate using it in your site. If you do get ranked first in Google on a search, it'll really drive a lot more traffic to your site, and that can help grow your audience. I know this is a lot, but I want to remind you to be creative and have fun. I hope my list has gotten you thinking. For Exercise 12, I want you to create a list of ways you'd like to market your blog. You don't have to use my ideas. You can come up with some of your own. If you come up with some really great ones, I hope you'll share them in the class discussion so we can all benefit from your ideas. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about measuring your success. So I'll see you there. 14. Measuring Success: Maybe it seems a little strange or a little preemptive to begin talking about measuring your success before you even build your blog, but I think it's a good thing to keep in mind even in the beginning. Hopefully, you've already defined success for yourself. But if not, you can go back to that lesson and work on Exercise 2. It's so important that you have your own definition of success, whether success means to learn a new skill, grow an engaged following, make connections with others, stick with a writing schedule, design a beautiful site, create an online community, improve your writing or art, elegantly market yourself, engage deeply with your readers, showcase your work and skills, land art or writing opportunities or something else altogether. Let me remind you again that measuring your success against anyone else's definition will be setting yourself up for failure. I think a lot of bloggers give up too soon, and part of that may be that they're measuring their success against someone else's definition. So how do you measure your success? Let me give you a few ideas. First, I want you to ask yourself, are you fulfilling your why? Your why is what fuels your entire blog, and that is how you both set yourself up for success and make sure you are successful. When you're measuring your success, I want you to return to your why. No matter what your why is, you want to think about why it is that you're keeping a blog and ask yourself, is your blog doing what you want it to do? If your blog is not fulfilling your why, try to think about why that might be, have you remembered to keep your why in mind throughout your blogging process? Have you been measuring your success or focusing what you do on someone else's definition of success or on something other than your why? You might also want to consider, how do you feel about the process of blogging? Do you enjoy it? Is it fun? Is it challenging? Are you exercising your creativity? Are you learning new things? How do you feel when you look at your site or read a post? How confident do you feel when you write a post? How well is your content calendar working for you? Are readers commenting, and what did they say? I know it can be tempting to look at numbers of things like pageviews, blog followers, comments, and all of those things are good to keep in mind, but they do not tell the whole story. If what you do on your blog connects with even one person and encourages and inspires them, I think you're doing your job. But again, you have to look at your purpose and remember your why. For numerical measures, use the analytics for your site and this is going to be platform-specific, but you can see things like pageviews and how long people spend on your site, what terms they're using to search to find things on your site. Google Analytics will provide more detailed information and that's something you're going to need to set up for your blog, and that also will be platform-specific. Again, the most important thing you need to ask is, are you fulfilling your why? Asking yourself these questions and answering them will help you get a feeling for how you're doing with your blog. Unlike social media posts which can get lost in the shuffle very quickly, your blog is there for anyone to find any time. So you never know when a certain post of yours might catch on with people just because someone either pinned it, or discovered it, or if the topic you're writing about suddenly becomes very popular. One more thing to keep in mind is that the Internet is vast and not every person who comes to your blog will be someone who will resonate with what you have to share, and that's okay. You want to find the readers who will be passionate about you and your work. So be patient, have fun, and keep sharing your beautiful gifts. Return to the ideas that I shared in the lesson about growing your audience. If you feel like you're not making enough traction, remember that your blog is only as good as the effort that you put into it. There is no such thing as overnight success. I once heard it said that an overnight success is 10 years in the making. I'm not saying that it'll take you 10 years to find success with your blog, but I want you to be patient. For Exercise 13, schedule monthly dates on your calendar to check your success, ask yourself those questions, and be sure most importantly to ask yourself, are you fulfilling your why? The next lesson is our last. I have a few final words to share with you before setting you off on your own. 15. Your Blog: We have covered a lot of ground and I know some of this may feel a little bit daunting. Just remember what I said in the first video, step back, take a breath and relax. This is creative and it should be fun. Take your time with all of the exercises. Remember, you are the one setting yourself up for success. I know that you can do it, and I can't wait to see your blog. Throughout class, I've asked you to share your thoughts in the discussion and I hope that you will. Be sure to ask any questions that you have in the class discussion and I will do my best to answer them. If you see questions from your fellow classmates and you know the answer or have opinions or ideas, be sure to jump into the conversation. We are all in this together and we can support and encourage one another. As I said in the beginning, you have a story that only you can share. The world needs your gifts. I want you to share them. For the final exercise of class, I want you to sign up for a platform and begin creating your site. Once you have your blog up and running, I would love to see it and I know that your other fellow classmates would love to see it as well. So be sure to upload your class project and include a link to your beautiful site. I hope you will follow me here on Skillshare to be kept up to date with my new classes and anytime I have a contest. I hope you'll jump over to my website and blog as well and follow me over there too. Thank you so much for taking this class. I really can't wait to see your blog until next time. Bye bye. 16. Bloopers: Blogging provides a wonderful, there is no wonderful. Blogs are still here. That's what almost 10 years later. No, almost 20 years later. Blogs are still here, they're not going anywhere. What? What do you say? No, 10 years. I can't do math. You still have a chance to, blah. I've seen more people turning to blogging as they get a bit of dissatisfaction. That's why I'm teaching this class. What? The reasons for your success. In the next lesson, we're going to talk in more detail a bit. Improving your art and your right. Improving the types of posts and what is shared on the blog will correlate. Let's take a poll.