Name of Your Blog
Straight Dope Dad | A Father's View on Parenting
Blog URL
http://www.straightdopedad.com/
Social networking or other contact links
http://twitter.com/StraightDopeDad
thedad@straightdopedad.com
What do you cover on your blog?
I enjoy deeper writings from a more philosophical or practical point of view so that's what I do on my blog. I don't do product reviews and I won't be telling you about every cute thing my daughter did today. I will however, give you an uncompromising and honest look into the deeper aspects of my life as a stay at home, self-employed father. Hopefully I'll make you laugh a bit along the way as well.
How did you start your blog?
I'm a designer (both for web and print) so stating my blog was relatively easy for me. Writing comes very easy to me so that is not a problem either. However, time is the real enemy. I always have a backlog of essays ready to finish up and I get to them when I can. I tend to write in bursts.
I promote my blog through commenting on other blogs, leveraging my extensive SEO skills, and making sure I'm on every fatherhood/parenting blog directory and list available. Above all I promote it by writing really good stuff. Good content promotes itself as people disseminate and share it among themselves.
One popular post I wrote about introversion got passed around on Stumble Upon and that alone brought in 80,000 visitors. Quite shocking and I'm very grateful for the traffic.
I never would have thought that that article would be my first viral post which brings me to the number one lesson - write from the heart and don't hold back.
What happens after that is largely beyond your control anyway.
Tips and Tricks
- Don't set unrealistic expectations.
- Quality is more important than quantity
- Develop a policy about how much identifying info you will give out ahead of time (names, photos, locations etc) You never know how many people will read this and what they will do with that information
- Getting a free Wordpress or Blogger blog is easier but getting your own domain and hosting it yourself is best. Call up Bluehost and they will walk you through the whole process - from registering the domain name, to setting up hosting, to installing your Wordpress blog.
