There are many reasons for a creative person to blog. For example, you can:
- Reflect on your own work and improve it.
- Seek feedback and guidance from other artists or interested individuals.
- Gain attention from prospective clients.
- Demonstrate a passion for your creative platform.
- Provide an insight into your creative thinking and sources of inspiration.
The prospect of writing a blog can be quite daunting, especially for people who struggle to put their thoughts into words. The aim this post is to give you some advice on how to start a creative blog, write interesting and relative content and get it noticed.
Stay on topic
When starting a new blog, choose a topic and stick to it. If your blog is focused on graphic design, then your entries could be about artists who inspire you or the briefs you’re currently working on. Don’t write about how drunk you got on Saturday night or who is annoying you in your personal life. It’s unprofessional.
Stuck for ideas? Look at other blogs for inspiration.
If you’re suffering from writer’s block, you could create a list of your favourite album covers, or write a short tutorial to demonstrate how to use brushes in Photoshop. Remember, blog entries can be presented in a variety of formats. These can be lists, tutorials, book reviews, event or conference summaries, etc. Use your blog as a digital sketch book as well as a platform to talk about your work.
Plan your content
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to write about, you need to think about the content you wish to include. Try writing a list of key points you want to discuss in your post. You can then turn these key points into short paragraphs.
Draft your post before publishing
Write your post in a word processing program such Word or Pages first. This will make it easier to proofread and you can use the spell checker. Avoid publishing your blog post and then proofreading it. People who subscribe to your blog will likely receive notification of the new post immediately, and seeing a poorly written entry with multiple spelling and grammar mistakes will not encourage them to return.
Think about your language and pitch
If you are writing a post about your design work, narrate it as if you were telling a story. Talk the viewer through your sources of inspiration, development and final product, using descriptive language and appropriate terminology. Never use bad language and avoid slang.
Seek permission and reference correctly
If you want to include images that don’t belong to you, it is polite to seek permission of the owner first. Many artists have no problem with their work being posted on other people’s blogs as long as they have been cited correctly. If you receive a request from an artist to remove their work from your blog, please do so. Remember to cite quotations too, using the Harvard Referencing System.
Use descriptive titles for your entries
Good titles will not only give your viewer an insight into what the post is about, but it will make your post more likely to show up in a search engine results list.
Add tags to your posts
Tags (or labels) make it easy for your viewers to find related posts within your blog archive. For example, this post is tagged with inspiration, tutorial and design, which will give a viewer the option to read more related posts by clicking on the appropriate tag. Remember to generalise tags when creating them so they can be applied to multiple posts, rather than a specific one.
Advertise your blog
The easiest way to get people to read your blog is to advertise it. Updating your status on Facebook and Twitter with a link to the new post will help direct traffic towards your blog. Contributing to other blogs or offering free-to-download content, such as desktop wallpapers, brushes and images, are other great ways to encourage people to visit your blog.
Update regularly
Ideally, you should aim to update your blog at least once a week. Followers will rapidly lose interest if your blog has not been updated in months. Also, avoid using your blog to add status updates. That’s what Twitter and Facebook are for.
