How to be an amatuer blogger

Written by: Jonah Goodman on Sep 1, 2006 3:21 PM EDT

Linked to groups: Blogs United

I am new to the group so be gentile. I posted this last night on dailykos and kid oakland invited me to the group and aksed me to repost. The original post and commnets are here;
www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/...


1. Subscribe to a Google News RSS feed - If you do an adavanced search [www.google.com/advanced_search?h...] on Google News you can set some nice parameters for what kind of news you want to hear about. I suggest both candidates names, district race (NY13), etc. After you click search to get your results there will be an RSS link on the left side just to this specific search parameter. It will make your life a lot easier.

2. Get your blog name out there - Writing stories or cross postings on related blogs, the later will be more beneficial. If there is a state wide blog, introduce yourself and see if they will let you guest blog. In NY there is Take Back New York [takebacknewyork.blogspot.com/...] where we have about 5 or 6 different bloggers who cover the various races. If you don't have a state wide blog aggregate like this, then step number two after you make your blog known is starting a state group blog. Someone else can handle advice on how to do that.

3. Use your newspapers sites - If they have message boards or blogs of their own, start posting on there with links to your blog. Also try writing some op-ed pieces if you are motivated and let them know you are a local blogger who is covering the race.

4. Post frequently - I started posting long intricate posts and managed one a every day or every two days. Recently I started doing 4-5 brief entries that are concise and have seen traffic increase and lots of local linking. Finding recurring topics can make your life easier. One of my daily posts [ny13.blogspot.com/2006/08/fossel...] is a simple day count on how long the incumbent has refused to accept a debate schedule. It keeps the topic out there, and doesn't require much research preparation.

5. Introduce yourself to the campaign - Once you get started let the campaign know you are out there. Make sure you subscribe to their email list, and you might want to drop their Press Secretary an email and see if there is a specific press release email list you can get on. Of course meeting your candidate at an event never hurts.

6. Know the candidate you are challenging - Make sure you subscribe to your challengers email lists to keep tabs on what they are saying and doing. In addition I find it useful to download all the photos the candidate has publicly on their website. There has been too many stories recently that have come out because of public photos, like an incumbent with Jack Abramoff or even the President. If you know what they have online it will be easy to tell if they try to scrub their site of evidence of friendships.

7. Get your blog listed on various political group blogs -
www.leftyblogs.com/...
Here is how to add your blog to LeftyBlogs; www.leftyblogs.com/cgi-bin/addrs...
www.ourcongress.org/...
www.sourcewatch.org... runs Congresspedia, a Congress based wiki that lists related blogs to each member of Congress, such as this one for Vito Fossella; www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti...

8. Familiarize yourself with Technorati - This was a slightly more advanced step when I first got started, but it is a necessity. http://technorati.com

"Technorati is the recognized authority on what's going on in the world of weblogs. We help people search for, surface, and organize bloggers and their daily posts."

So it is basically a Google search engine for blogs. It knows when you post and tells the world if you have tagged your blog sensibly.
On the home page, on the left hand side is a button "Claim my blog". After you click through and set up your blog info you get to set various tags for your blog, just as you tag a diary here on kos. Use your tags! Use incumbent and challenger names, districts or office abbreviations (NY13 or NY-Sen) as we use. I also use a local georgraphic names (i.e. Staten Island), Congress, Democrat, Corruption. Update them if needed as your blog grows.

7b. Pinging Technorati - technorati.com/ping...
The Technorati engine can be a little slow realizing when you have posted a new entry, so if you have the time 'ping' them. This tells them to go look at your site for updates, and expedites getting it into their system.

9. Image hosting sites - You can upload your images to these sites, and they provide you with html image source code to cut and paste into your posting to display any photo you want.
www.photobucket.com...
www.imageshack.com...
www.uploadfile.info...

10. Sitemeter - Use a program like http://www.sitemeter.com to view traffic patterns for your blog. One benefit to this, aside from understanding traffic patterns, is using the 'By Referrals' option to see what sites are referring traffic to your blog. If you have an influx of traffic from another blog it is always good to know why they are sending you traffic and if appropriate reciprocate. Also if you follow the referral links to search engines you can see what people are searching for when they found your blog. This may give you an idea of what kind of information people are looking for. For example one of my hits toady from Google was a search for "Fossella Veterans" (Fossella being the Republican incumbent) and the viewer clicked through to my post on Fossella's failures on National Security, specifically under funding Veterans benefits.

11. Understanding Google - Read up on Google bombs [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bom...] if you are not familiar with them. One benefit of frequent blogging on a subject is that if done correctly it can raise your blog in terms of relevance on a google search. One easy way to do this is to control a search term by constantly hyper-linking it to a specific URL. For instance whenever I reference Rep. Vito Fossella in my posts I link his name to this great NY Daily News article www.nydailynews.com/news/politic...
By continually doing this I have a small impact in keeping that story in the top 5 returns on Google for the search term "Rep. Vito Fossella".

Additional suggestions are encouraged.

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