Introductory post for this series.
Mikey Mongol blogs here at the Carnival, and has a new blog, A Savage Place.
When did you start blogging?
Way back in the mists of time, around the turn of the millennium, I was splitting my time between two cities — I had a job in one and a girlfriend in another. I set up a personal blog to keep my sets of friends in both cities the loop as to what was going on with my life. That got me started. The girlfriend eventually fell by the wayside, but the blog didn’t.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and I started a couple of small-scale blogging projects to try to kickstart my writing career. It was a short step from there to contributing to bigger blogs. And here we are.
What do you like about blogging?
Blogging keeps me writing, if not every day, then at least several times a week, on a wide variety of topics (Q: “How do you get to Carnegie book deal?” A: “Practice, practice, practice.”) It also gives me a chance to share opinion with a huge talent pool of diverse personalities, with many of whom I’ve forged strong working relationships and/or friendships. The networking opportunities are fantastic!
Is blogging a major or minor way of connecting to other people for you?
I keep in touch with a lot of geographically distant friends with my personal blog, and a good number of my working contacts have come from the blogosphere as well.
I cannot overstate the value that blogging has added to my networking efforts. Nothing replaces face-to-face interaction, of course, but the social circles that blogging has opened up for me are ones that I otherwise would never have had a chance to access.
Where’s your blog? Do you use a free hosted service (Blogger,WordPress, Livejournal, AOL, Google Pages, etc.) or do you have your own domain and web server?
In the course of my blogging career I’ve used several free public hosted services — LiveJournal and Blogger among them — as well as my own independent blogs hosted on my own private webspace. Using a hosted service is definitely easier. While you do give up a certain level of control by not running your own blog on your own server, for casual, single-writer, not-for-profit blogging, I can’t really see too many advantages in not using Blogger. Having your own domain name certainly helps convey an air of professionalism and seriousness, but it’s easy as pie to set up URL forwarding to sent folks from your own domain name to your hosted blog.
Once you start wanting to monetize your blog, or you have several contributors on several different topics, or your hit count starts increasing enough that you need more robust comment-management tools, or you want to do more with your site design than a hosted service will let you, then it’s probably time to switch to a more individualized blogging solution.
What do you do to promote your blog or your writing (using tags in your post, blog roll, del.icio.us, Digg, Pingoat)?
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t do much in the way of Digg or del.icio.us or tagging or other such search-engine optimization techniques. Most of my traffic comes from reciprocal links and comments that I leave in the blogs of others. If I were really serious about getting my hits up, I could and would do all of that wacky stuff, but right now I’m content to expand through the blog version of word-of-mouth.
Met Art
Gallery Carre
