How To Blog Without A Blog

Piers Fawkes provides fresh suggestions about blogging

You just can’t get away from it: the press, the magazines, your peers telling you, that you should set up a blog. Whether it’s for your business or for your professional or personal reputation, everyone thinks setting up a blog is the way forward.

But with 10 million blogs out there, how does a would be blogger ever get heard? Yes, you could set up your blog and search engine optimise it and then ask all your friends to link to it – but with my experience, creating a popular blog takes time and is no overnight success.

The key reason that blogs take time is content. I believe that content truly is king. Blogging is all about the content – and to run with the big boys, a blogger must offer quality news, POV and original content on a daily basis. So hands up: how many of you have the time to do this everyday? How many of you are willing to wake up at 6am to blog for couple of hours before work, blog at lunch, then blog past midnight when you get home at night? Not so many, I suspect.

But there still is an opportunity to ride the wave. Blogs love new and original content. Instead of trying to build a new blog, why not just hop on board another? Imaginative thinkers with good writing skills could develop a reputation for themselves, and their business, by offering content on their expert themes to niche, but popular, blogs. If accepted, the publishing blog will grant you an audience that would have been difficult to build – and they’ll probably throw in a link to your company’s web site or your personal resume/CV too. You could take this one step further and become a regular contributor to a blog. Several blogs now are considered ‘group blogs’ where various contributors pot to a blog.

To really make yourself notices consider this final suggestion – offer exclusive content that is on the cutting edge of blogging. Explore how you can work with tools like Flickr; or offer a blog an interview with a major industry leader that you’ve recorded digitally for podcasting; or even investigate a topic with your video camera and provide a site a vidcast via Google Video.

Good examples where multi-blogging can be found is SmartMobs, Boing Boing, Ecademy, PSFK and IF (of course) and iMedia Connection. But if you find a site that doesn’t seem to have any external contributors – just ask! Everyone loves a new point of view.

It’s important that you participate in the blogging revolution. Owning a blog is just a small part of it – it’s content that will get you noticed.

Contributed By Piers Fawkes, Freelance Planner & IF/PSFK Publisher