How to Blog-A new column and 5 steps to get started

I’m starting a new column here on indyish that I hope other people will contribute to. I’m definitely not an expert in the blogosphere, and I tend to send a lot of short emails to Risa and Elran asking how to do this and that. But over the last year and a half, I’ve found my way around the blogging software Wordpress that we use on Indyish. And in my new role as Site Editor I’ve spent some time helping people ready their posts for publishing. So here are my tips for beginner bloggers.

This first How to Blog post goes through the technical steps to get your posts ready to publish and will make your posts easy to find on Indyish and in google searches. Forgive me if I’m overly simplistic at times, it’s intended as a step-by-step guide for artists who have never blogged with Wordpress before. I’ll also write more specific stuff about posting products soon, because it’s a bit different. But if that’s what you really came here for, check this out.

Please feel free to jump in with your own tips in the comments section. Indyish bloggers can also write posts with “How to Blog” in the title and continue the column.

A few links to get us started:

>>Are there any rules or guidelines for blogging on Indyish?

>>What am I supposed to blog?

Here are the 5 basic steps to blogging on Indyish:

Choose a title * Check off categories * Write your post * Add links * Pick tags

To get started: Login from any page of the site in the top righthand corner, click Dashboard (next to your name in the right corner), then click Write. More help on that here.

Now you’re ready to blog!

(1) Choose a title

Interesting titles are nice. They intrigue people and make them want to read on. You hear that a lot. But specific to blogging, you also want to put good keywords in your title. So if the post is about a show you saw, put the name of the show in the title and maybe the names of important people related to the show (director, writer, band name, artist) and any other exciting words associated with the topic. Here’s a well-titled post that will show up a lot in searches:

“New Indyish Artist - Nightwood & E.P. Diary- Part 1″ is located at the web address:
http://www.indyish.com/new-indyish-artist-nightwood-ep-diary-part-1

All the info is there, and search bots can find it. Titles don’t have to be long, just informative.

An example of a good product title is: “Black agate drops earrings”. Its url (web address) is: http://www.indyish.com/black-agate-drops-earrings. Easy!!

(2) Check off categories

If you’re writing a blog post, check off “Blog”. Blog posts are everything except for products.

If you’re writing a product post, check off “Products” and then the subcategories that apply, like “Clothing”, and then “T-shirts”. Don’t check off blog if you’re posting a product; your post will appear on the blog automatically.

If you don’t do this, your post will end up “Uncategorized” and won’t show up on the front page of the site and other important places.

More on categories in the how-tos.

(3) Write your post

That’s write! err right! Write from personal experience, write with details, write with context! Personal experience is great, it’s exactly what blogging lets you showcase, so talk like yourself. Details will focus your ideas to make the post unique and interesting to readers. Where, who, when, and what are you talking about? Who is John? What is the event you’re planning to go to? Where exactly is it being performed? Links are great for this (more on links below). But just saying what you mean works too. A lot happens on the Indyish blog, so context is key. And since the audience on Indyish is internationally-based, how does what you’re saying make sense to someone in another country? Why is it important to an artist in the next city over? Or even, what can your nextdoor neighbours take away from your writing? Teach, express, describe!

Textlinks are all the words in this post that are yellow and that take you to other pages when you click on them.

Links are awesome! They’re sort of like citing your references in an article, but they’re more fun than that.

You can link to all kinds of stuff. If you mention a band, provide a link to where people can listen to their music (myspace, band website, label profile). If you talk about a concept or project or person link to more info or a bit of history on the topic (wikipedia is an easy one, or use a search engine to find a well-written article in another publication, blog, or newspaper). Link to other people’s blogs! This is really great because bloggers love to check who’s writing about them and when they find your post they’ll likely comment on it or at least keep you on their radar. Link inside Indyish. You can search indyish for related posts by clicking the search button in the top righthand corner of every page of the site and then link to one of the search results that’s useful to your discussion.

How the heck do you link, anyway? It’s totally easy and you will feel a rush when you do it the first time. Ok maybe not.

Highlight the text in your post that you want to be clickable, click the box at the top of the post editor that says the word “link” in blue, or the image of a blue chainlink (if you’re using the Visually Rich Editor, but don’t stress the difference), copy in the web address you want to link to, including http://, click enter, and you should be good to go.

For a handy reference for writing links check the forums.

If you’re really just starting with the whole blogging thing and are already overwhelmed by some of the stuff in this post, don’t worry about tags, an Indyish editor will add some relevant tags to your post and you can go on your merry way until you have the other stuff down. If you feel ready to try it out (it’s basically just clicking a button) then read on….

Tags organize and help people find pages on Indyish. When you search the site, one of the things that the search engine looks for is tags. Another thing is the title, but you’ve already aced title-writing. Tags will also make your posts show up in Google and Yahoo searches more frequently. You want people to see your work! So use tags. They’ll make a difference in where you rank.

Tags also give a sense of what’s being talked about in our community. Using tags that already exist helps build the importance of those tags and groups similar posts together, for example in the section of a post that says “Related Posts”. And check out the front page of Indyish for a “tag cloud” where the most used tags are largest and lesser-used tags are smaller.

Tags screenshot

Indyish now uses 3 methods to suggest tags for your posts, so you don’t have to come up with them all yourself. Read about that here, plus look at some screenshots of what it will look like when you add tags. You can also type in your own tags (and Wordpress will suggest tags that already exist on Indyish as you type), just separate each tag with a comma. Choose specific words like names of people and objects talked about, names of shows, projects, venues, locations, productions, and then larger subject words, so things like “music”, “activism”, “gender”. For products, choose descriptive words like “blue”, “cloth”, “beadworking”. It’s a bit like the index section of a book. You can find the tags for each published post underneath the writing and above the author’s bio, where it says, “Related tags”. You can click on tags and you’ll be taken to a page that lists all the posts that have that tag.

Try clicking some of the tags at the bottom of this post…

Once you’ve done all 5 of these steps, your post should be ready to submit for review by an editor!! So click, SUBMIT FOR REVIEW.

An editor will read your post and make sure everything looks good before publishing it to the group blog. After you’ve written a few successful posts you’ll be upgraded from a contributor to a full co-author and be able to publish directly to the blog.

Ok, thanks for reading! I hope this is helpful. You can bookmark this post to refer to when you’re blogging. And any questions, even really silly or simple ones can be asked on the forums and someone will answer them asap. More blogging tips to come, just look for “How to Blog” in the title of a post, or search for “how to blog” on Indyish or in a search engine. Because you totally know how to do that now!!

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