How to Make Money with Your Wedding Blog (Part Three)

It's Friday again (don't even know how that happened!) and that means it's time to continue the blog series on How to Make Money with Your Wedding Blog. This series is broken down into five parts:

1. Blogging 101.
2. Creating an attractive wedding blog.
3. Writing posts that people will want to read.
4. Directing traffic to your wedding blog.
5. Profiting from your wedding blog.

We've already the first two, so now we're on to number three...

Part Three: Writing Posts That People Will Want to Read

The last two posts in this series have been pretty technical and not so creative. It does take some creativity to come up with the title for your blog and the way you want your blog to look, but when it comes to writing you're pretty much running on 100% creativity. This is the part of blogging that most people complain about when starting out. I can't even tell you how many times I've heard "I just don't have anything to say." Well, I can tell you without a single doubt that that isn't true for anyone reading this post. Everybody has something to say...it just might not be the most exciting "something" in the history of the world...

Why Write?

Here's the hard cold truth about blogging: Most blog entries that enter the internet ether are not that interesting. In fact, a lot are downright boring. Some are even brain-suckingly mundane. But that doesn't mean that those people shouldn't be blogging. In my opinion, blogging isn't about entertaining everyone else...and I can tell you with almost complete certainty that if you start out blogging with the idea that you have to thoroughly entertain everyone who stops by your blog, you will hate blogging. That's way too much pressure. You can't entertain everyone and you can't write something that everyone will like.

But, for whatever reason, I do think that people-pleasing is the main motivation behind the five most popular reasons for blogging:

1. To have their friends and family read about what they are up to.
2. To have strangers from the internet read your writing and give you positive feedback.
3. To convince other people that you are intelligent/right/funny/cool.
4. To have people want to come to your blog so often that you can make mad cash with advertising.
5. To anonymously share embarrassing or snarky things about other people.
   

It might seem like I'm giving these reasons a negative spin, but I really don't mean to. I don't think it's a bad thing to want your family and friends to know what you're up to. This wedding blog got started because I wanted a place for our moms to check in on the wedding planning. I like receiving positive feedback from strangers. I'm guilty of sharing snarky things about other people on the internet. BUT all of these reasons have to do with blogging to elicit reactions from other people and that makes blogging a lot harder since you simply can't control what other people are going to think of your blog.

So, why blog if you aren't trying to entertain everyone? Consider these five alternative motivations behind blogging:

1. To practice your writing.
2. To record events or time periods (or your life in general) and hang onto those memories.
   
3. To make yourself think through things so that you determine how you feel about them.
4. To add your voice and support to a community that shares your interests.
5. To practice and experiment with blogging as a hobby.

These motivations fall into the personal growth and reflection category and hopefully you're running off of at least a couple of these, in addition to the others. If none of these sound interesting and you really are just in it to interact with other people, that's fine. Just be prepared to grow a bit of a thick skin. Strangers on the internet are negative as often as they are positive and the hard cold truth is that your friends and family are not all going to want to read your blog. It doesn't matter what you write about and how great of a writer you are - someone you know doesn't want to read your blog. Case in point? Kyle doesn't read this blog. Apparently he "gets enough of me at home"...whatever that means...

How to Write

Now that you've clarified your motivations and grown a thicker skin, it's time to start writing. I'd love to cram an entire writing course into this blog post, but that's not going to happen. If you really want to learn more about becoming a great writer, I recommend reading great writers. When I'm really stuck, I read a chapter or two from a writer that I really respect and then try writing right after. Reading great authors flavors your writing and I don't think there's anything wrong with borrowing a little bit of talent from someone else every now and then. Just be aware of the fact that switching between Alice Walker flavoring and Stephen King flavoring all the time may confuse your readers.

Oddly enough, I don't believe that being a great writer automatically translates into being a great blog writer, and vice versa. Blog writing is something of a different species because blog writing involves short posts that are generally very personal and autobiographical. There are bloggers who blog almost exclusively in fiction or prose, but they aren't the most popular. Most popular bloggers do three things really well:

1. They are honest with their readers (and themselves) in their writing.
2. They come up with blog post topics that are interesting or are things that people can relate to.
3. They are good about posting at least 4-5 times a week.

Those are the things that I think really make a good blog. Being honest about your life, and especially your shortcomings, is difficult and intimidating in the beginning, but the fact is that people will read you if they feel like they really know you and that they have something in common with you. Just don't pour it all out at the expense of other people. Remember that what you say on the internet is public and if you wouldn't say it to the face of everyone you know (or don't know) then it's not something you want up in a blog post.

Here are some other tips exclusive to writing for blogs:

• Pick a thought or topic and stick with it throughout the post. Stream-of-consciousness writing is hard to read and it's frustrating to start reading a post interested in what the writer is talking about only to find yourself falling down the rabbit hole with someone's rain of thought.
• Try not to be too repetitive with your language. This is a really tough one, at least for me. I use words like "really", "so", "however", and "totally" all the time. It's a good idea to skim through your post after you've read it to try to catch those repeats. If every sentence in a single paragraph starts with "however", that's bad writing.
• Correct mistakes in spelling and punctuation. Nothing puts me off so much as those kinds of errors.
• Break your writing into bite-sized pieces. Giant paragraphs are off-putting because most people aren't going to want to spend a lot of time on your blog. The vast majority of blog readers are hard core skimmers. Use short paragraphs and break up your writing with things like lists, pictures, and clear headings.
• Don't be too clever with your post titles. I'm guilty of this as well, but I've noticed that blogs that are titled clearly are easier to find for people who are just Googling blindly, looking for information that you've put in your blog. People who stumble across your blog accidentally are likely to become your biggest audience after a while, so it's a good idea to bring them in when you can. Of course, we'll talk more about that when we move on to next week's topic...

Stay tuned for Part Four: Directing Traffic to Your Wedding Blog