My Community-Growing Plan

So I have been tasked with figuring out what I can do to grow my blog’s community. This makes me think about what I have learned so far, what has worked to create readership so far. So, I will be looking a bit at my stats, and thinking through what the NunesMagician has said.

DBCOX Stats for June 9, the busiest day for the blog so far.

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Growing (My) Blogging Community

This week in my course, we are thinking and learning about growing a blogging community. After all, a blog with no readership is really more like a diary. And I don’t keep a diary. I do keep an iPhone notes app full of ideas – this is where I really intersect with the idea of blogging. A lot of my ideas are short thoughts, odd takes on the world or what-ifs. When asked if I have a blog – when I tell people I think of myself as a writer – I think of this sort of content. But I also think of blogging a whole story. Read more of this post

Building Sample Content

This week we are looking at what sorts of content blogs regularly post. Which means this is also prep for building our own content.

So three approaches:

  • First, one built on existing content. A newsflash: Amelia Earhart possible crash site found. Taking the angle of being an Amelia Earhart blog, break the news.
  • Second, a list post, listing something like a top ten, which is what I plan on doing. This can be on any topic. More on my topic in a second.
  • Third, a link post, giving connections to other information on the subject. This should be on the same topic as the last one, to approach the topic from a couple of angles.

I was thinking about “writing” as my topic, but my initial look shows that directly blogging fiction is somewhat rare, and will take some deeper digging on my part. Sadly, the people who have so far found this blog seem to have found it from the writing angle as well (liking what I have seen so far at The Literary Man). But I just don’t feel like the subject matter expert there yet.

However, I was just at the Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian, and I think I could create some good content around video games. So expect to see these posts coming up here in the next couple of days!

Introduction

Whoa, glad I took a look at the class a bit harder before the weekend! I read that the blog needed to be started by Monday, posted on Monday, and I was assuming next Monday! Looks like I am running behind!
My name is David Cox and this is my blog for IST 600, Blogging for Information Professionals. I like to think that I am working as an information professional right now, as I work in retail banking as a manager. This requires a huge knowledge base, and an equally huge knowledge management apparatus. Of course, my co-workers tend to just ask me for the answers! It’s a good backup plan.
I’m about to go on vacation, so we’ll see how they do without me!
What I don’t get to do much of in my current line of work is writing, something I am passionate about. But when I say that to people, the response I tend to always get is: do you have a blog?
Well, no.
So I think I ought to get my mind wrapped around blogging, to understand it as a professional skill, and to contemplate it as a personal tool.
When I think of blogging as a professional tool, what do I think of? you ask. Well, in my early days of my MSLIS studies (I started summer ’09, going to school part time takes some time as I am finding out!), I came across the Ann Arbor Public Libraries site. Their library site is a blog. Simple, elegant, engaging. Something I feel like I would be happy to be involved in, and confident to present to an employer.
That’s a little about me. Time to move beyond the basics I have pulled together here, and go start learning a bit more about blogging!