Blogging with Meaning

In the beginning....blogging began as a whim. The whim turned into a hobby. The hobby turned into a long term learning experience. The learning experience turned into an avocation. The process of learning to do this took a long time.  I ran into several problems the biggest being how to stay focused.  This is the story about what I discovered.

Blogging is much like starting a conversation with your audience. If you are good at talking about a variety of subjects, you could blog forever. If you are writing a personal blog and not promoting anything but yourself, your material must be unique. If you want anyone besides Aunt Tilda to read your material, you need to ask your self a few questions.

1. What do I have to say?

2. Where will I find unique ideas?

3. Who do I want to read my material?

4. How do I stay focused?

5. What do I know enough about to write for others?

6. Do I expect "instant" success?

I am sure other people could add to this list using their own experience. I started with no expectations at all. But as I began to learn about the process I found I had more questions than answers. It was like learning to play the piano...only time and practice would improve the sound of my words!

When there was only one blog it seemed that keeping focused was very difficult. I wrote fiction and poetry. But then I found opinions and informational articles creeping more and more into the content. I knew that some people had several blogs so I began looking into using a different blog service and buying domains.

In the end I decided to divide the material in the original blog into three categories. The orginal blog "It Crossed My Mind!" became the home for all the creative material I would write. "Just Give Me the Facts" became home to political opinions posts and the occasional rant. The third blog has become my information blog. It is called "Retire in Style Blog"...I spend most of my effort writing for it. All these blogs are published on Blogger. I found this service met all my needs at no cost!

Then I found another home here at HubPages. I love this place because I can share what I have learned in those other places.

Since I had decided that most of my efforts would be used on the Retire In Style blog, I will use it as an example.

I still had a lot of learning to do. Up until I sorted the blogs, all my material had been fictitious material or philisophical rambling. Those articles were just a tune up for what I was to do next.

Retire in Style required that I keep to the subject. It is important when we are arguing with our spouse and equally as important when we are writing for a specific audience. Teachers of writing will have some pretty scathing things to say to an author that wanders all over everything. A reader will just go away! I don't know what you want but I don't want my readers to leave. Writing for my blog aimed at boomers/retirees has required that I publish articles that would appeal to that age group. If I didn't do that, they would not stay around to read past the first three sentences. The question was what subject would provide enough material so the blog could survive over a period of time.

So what did I do? I began reading what other bloggers and professional people were writing for this age group. I read newspaper articles and research material. Anywhere I found an article that related to my age group, I read and took note of how and what they wrote about.

I stored all the information away. But I still didn't have the final piece that tied everything together. I did not want to write about one subject...I wanted to write about what interested me. I am assuming that others in my age group will be interested too. I kept working and most articles could follow a story line that kept everything in sync. But the research articles were all lacking something...I needed to tie the information to the age group I was writing for and about.

I was dreaming when the light bulb came on! I suppose the distance between what I had learned in a college classroom and today had left the key idea hidden in a drawer in my mind. It turned out to be a template I had used many years ago. One of my favorite college professors taught her students to write using the model. She taught us to followed by our research article with our personal take on the information. She called those thoughts "implication and applications".

I began seeing what the implications for my research was and then I began thinking about how the information could be applied in real life. It was the key to staying focused. It worked for everything from information on downsizing your home or small space living to the latest in technology. It was not what the subject was. It was how the information applied to a boomer/retirees way of living. For me that was the key.

Today I will finish this article. Later in the day I will write an article on Retire in Style about Arizona or the weather or what book I will read next.  The article will be for boomers/retirees. Keeping a blog audience is not easy. We have to publish frequently, do it with material that relates to the audience and stay focused.

Have a wonderful day!

b