In thinking about my earlier post on blogging your way to a book, I realized that not only can a blog benefit you by providing a means to generate a book or other publishable content but it can, with a little thought, help you to focus your blog more effectively. If you want to get noticed on the internet, focus is good, very good.
So, “Tom,” you ask, “how do I write a book and focus my blog at the same time?” Glad you asked. Think about your passion, your topic, the focus for your blog and create an outline that’s roughly analogous to the chapter titles of the book you’d write on the topic, if you were writing a book (you aren’t, you’re writing a BLOG … wink/wink). So let’s say I want to write a book on blogging (hmmmm, now that’s original, you’re thinking to yourself). I might start by creating the following Chapter Headings:
- What is a blog
- Getting Started Blogging
- What Should I Write My Blog About
- Publicizing My Blog
- Monetizing My Blog
- Blogging Tools & Resources
- Etc.
What I’ve just done, in this example, are identify a few of what I feel are the important competencies or knowledge groups a beginning or intermediate blogger needs to know. In the book writing world, I have, as I said, created possible chapters. In the blogging world, I’ve identified categories. If you look at my blog and most blogs generated with serious blogging tools (e.g., Typepad, WordPress) you’ll often notice a categories section. This is a means by which bloggers can break their content into logical groupings. My categories include Blogging, Calls to Action, Developing Content, etc. As a reader, if you’re only interested in what I have to say about Search Engine Optimization, for example, you’d click on that category and be able to read everything I’ve written related to SEO.
If you’d ultimately like a book to pop out of your blog you want to make sure that you don’t get to the end of the year and realize, “Gee, I forgot to write about that…” or, “Wow, I have 600 articles on Getting Started… but only 2 on Publicizing My Blog.” Categories can help you maintain not only focus for your efforts but balance, as well. My next step would be to take each of the 6 ‘Chapter Headings’ I created and turn them into blog categories. This serves two purposes, it reminds me that I need to maintain appropriate breadth in my blogging as well as keep a good balance so that I don’t post too much on one topic and not at all on another, equally important area. I use WordPress for my blogging software and, as I create, categorize and post content, it keeps a running total of the number of posts listed under each item. So I can easily know, everytime I access my blog, what I need to write about and how much.
So, in short, by taking this approach, not only am I writing a book but even if it never turns into a book, I’ve developed a system that will pay dividends because of the sharper focus it will provide to my blog. You don’t want readers, you want fanatics and you cultivate fanatics by stoking the fires of their passion with mutually interesting content. The same goes with search engines and other directories. Google, et al, care mostly about content. They identify and catalogue you based on what they believe you’re all about (your content). The more content you provide and the more focused that content is, then the higher you will rank in their search listings.
