Starting your blog is easy. Growing your blog is not. Growing your blog requires a rhetorical strategy that persuades audiences to accept your arguments and take certain actions. To execute that strategy, you need a particular set of skills.
These skills can seem daunting at first, but with any major genre of writing, it takes time and practice before you begin to feel comfortable. With blogging in particular, do your best to focus on process over product and progress over perfection. As you work to expand the influence of your blog, you will begin to see which skills are most relevant to your situation at different stages along the way.
So what specific skills do you need?
Blogging skills can be broken into the following three categories:
The Blogger’s Toolbox
The Blogger’s Role in Society
The Blogger’s Market
(I based these categories on Joyce Locke Carter’s three dimensions of a fully-realized technical communicator: the instrumental dimension, the critical dimension, and the productive dimension.)
The Blogger’s Toolbox
The blogger’s tool box contains the things a blogger must know how to use or manipulate in order to create content. Here is just a short list of some of the major skill compartments in the blogger’s toolbox:
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- Grammar, punctuation, and usage.
- Style
- Editing
- Logic (to avoid fallacious thinking)
- Persuasive strategies
- Research strategies
- Writing productivity strategies
- Basic web design principles
- Content management systems (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarepace, etc. )
- Image design software (Photoshop, Canva, PicMonkey, etc.)
- Screen recording software (e.g., Camtasia, ScreenFlow)
- Video equipment and editing software (e.g., Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere)
- Podcasting equipment and sound editing software (GarageBand, Adobe Audition, etc.)
- Email delivery software (e.g., AWeber, Mailchimp, etc.)
- Social media platforms
- …the list could easily go on.
These are neutral skills you must learn and practice in order to build proficiency in communicating your ideas. You don’t need to master all of these skill sets, but you can distinguish yourself by getting really good at a few of them. The more the merrier, but remember that your focus should be on learning the skills that are most relevant to your blogging purpose.
Skills in this category are important, but no matter how proficient you become at using tools, no matter how sterling your prose, how polished your sound and video editing, how professional your site layout, how consistent your social media activity, you’re not likely to succeed without understanding and developing your skills in the next two categories.
The Blogger’s Role in Society
I think good bloggers understand that as they create content, they adopt certain values, which are communicated, explicit or not, to their audience. You have a responsibility as a blogger to define what your values are and to critique your own work to ensure those values are reflected in the language and images you use. You must also monitor yourself to ensure you are not subconsciously reinforcing negative stereotypes about people or groups in your audience and challenge yourself to answer soberly the question of how your online practices empower some people and how they might possibly disempower others.
As you create content, you should build skill in addressing the following questions:
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- How does my work treat and represent different sexes, races, classes, and genders?
- What people benefit from my online work and how?
- Is it possible that my online work does unintended harm to certain groups? How should this be addressed?
- What cultural and political values does my work represent? Am I fine with that? Am I open to alternative views?
- Am I being as inclusive as possible when writing to audiences?
- Do I respond respectfully to reasonable objections? Or am I too quick to shut out other voices and further insulate myself from other people’s legitimate concerns?
- Am I transparent when it comes to making decisions?
- Does my online work help people solve their problems? Or does my work exploit my audience?
- With my work, am I seeking positive change or defending important social values?
These are tough questions, and ultimately political, but posing them to yourself is essential for making sure you are doing work that is ethical and socially responsible, two qualities that must accompany you as you build skills in the next category.
The Blogger’s Market
Finally, a good blogger understands the market she participates in—and is skilled in answering the following:
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- How do my ideas complement or compete with the ideas of others.
- How does my work add value to my audience.
- How are my ideas (or blog) positioned against others. How do I differentiate myself?
- How does my creative work respond to the scarcity of audience attention? Does it do so ethically?
- What revenue strategies will support my creative work?
- What relationships do I have with other creators? What relationships should I be building?
- Is there a market for my work? In other words, is there an exigence which compels my message? Or is there a legitimate problem which my services (or products) attempt to solve?
That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but again, keep in mind that acquiring these blogging skills is not something that happens overnight. It’s a long process that requires study, practice, and a spirit of deliberation and experimentation. Above all, it requires patience and deep reflection about what kind of blog you want to run and how much change you want to make.