Desperate Curiosity

I started writing for Desperate Curiosity August of 2007. While it hasn’t been such a long time, this blog has witnessed my growth as a professional blogger. My struggles in trying to learn the ropes while advising people on what I learn at the same time are all chronicled here. It’s been quite a journey for me, and while I cannot condense everything I’ve written in a couple of paragraphs, here is a summarization of all advices I’ve dispensed so far.

1. Building your own blog isn’t so hard. Of course, you’d have to choose between using free or paid blogging platforms, and after that, choose your blog design, but all in all, it’s very enjoyable. Or you can hire a blog techie to take care of all the backend stuff for you.

2. Of course, if you don’t want to build your own blog, you can always blog for others. Finding a blogging gig requires you to be knowledgeable about your topic and the mechanics of blogging though, so make sure you still know the basics.

3. Writing posts is the easy part if you know your niche well, but there are times when you just have an eclipse of ideas and you don’t know what to write. When you’re inspired and can think of a lot of ideas for posts, make sure to save some for rainy days.

4. Don’t forget to network constantly and form working relationships with other bloggers. Social bookmarking web sites are your friends.

5. There are times when you over-commit, and get sick, you know you need a vacation. Don’t forget to rest too!

6. You have to manage your time when you handle multiple blogs and need to speed blog. It takes a while getting used to, but you’ll get it after a while.

7. Last of all, never forget to have fun with what you’re doing or it won’t be worth all the effort.

Hope you learned something from everything I’ve written since the start. Thanks for dropping by Desperate Curiosity to read my work. I wish you all the best in your future blogging endeavors.

I used to blog around 12 hours per day, 7 days per week last year. My life revolved around blogging and blogging some more. My mom was concerned with the kind of life I was living — after all, after work, I sleep, and when I wake up, it’s back to work again. It’s a never-ending cycle many of those who problog full time experience. When you get sucked into being a work-a-holic, it’s hard to get out, believe me. I’m sure even those with 9 to 5 jobs get what I’m trying to say. It’s especially hard because sometimes, there are no boundaries between your personal and work life, what with many probloggers working at home.

However, a few months later, when I started becoming ill for periods of time, I realized the mistake I was making. If I didn’t get my life back, or at least get a bit of rest, I’ll definitely kick the bucket soon. After a while, I had to decide to rest during the weekends. It was imperative for me to be able to recover. Miraculously, I got in the same amount of work despite shaving hours off of my usual workday and the whole weekend altogether.

Bloggers need rest because:

1. Health problems may arise.

2. You’ll work better and faster with a rested mind.

3. You might lose real life friends in process.

4. You need time for other things in life.

5. You’re also human.

Since I’ve started resting, I realized that I’m a much happier and healthier person. Whereas before I was always cranky, I can manage to joke every once in a while now. Don’t be tempted to stop living life even if you earn from blogging. Create a proper balance and you’ll definitely feel better.

If you own a news blog in any niche, you’d understand how hard it is when I say that finding original stories for your blog might be a bit difficult. It’s so much easier to surf to other blogs and gather stories from them, but you don’t always want to play second fiddle to other blogs now, do you? You have to find ways to gather original stories. Here are the places where I usually get mine:

(Due to the numerous web sites mentioned below, you would need to google them yourselves to find the URLs.)

1. Press Release Distribution Sites

There are many PR distribution web sites to choose from, but my favorites would be PR Newswire and Business Wire. You can select from the numerous categories and add their feeds to your RSS reader.

2. Search Engines

Yahoo News and Google News are your friends. Between the two, I must say I favor Yahoo News more, although both could definitely help you out.

3. Online Newspapers

Reuters has a web site. So does The New York Times and Daily Mail UK, just to mention a couple.

4. News-syndicating sites.

You can try Slashdot for tech stories and Newsvine for everything else.

5. Word of mouth.

As you continue writing for your niche, there might be times when someone would tip you about a lead.

These are but a few of the places where I usually troll for leads. How about you? If you write for a news site, where do you get your stories from?

A recent Wired article talked about an electric car company which Wired said was a “hype-machine,” banking on their press releases for popularity, but falling short most of the time. This reminds me of those times when bloggers try to bring attention to their blogs through every means possible. While catching people’s attention on the onset is good (it provides you audience, after all), if you do nothing but heighten the hype of your blog, you won’t get loyal regulars. You don’t want your blog to be called “all hype and no substance” now, do you?

1. Limit your linkbaits.

Seriously. Sure, you’ve seen a huge spike on your traffic when you came up with a linkbait. Doesn’t mean you have to mimic the effort every day. Set a schedule for linkbaiting, such as doing it once every week.

2. Don’t stir up a huge controversy.

If you have a strong opinion about another person’s article and you decided to write about it, that’s one thing. But trying to rile other people up by writing controversial posts about their articles of themselves is another. Don’t try to write a linkbait with the purpose of making a select group of people hate you. Believe me, it’s not worth the effort. You’ll end up with a huge mess to clean afterwards.

3. Just write about what would contribute to other people’s knowledge.

Most of the time, you just have to write about what matters. Think of what your audience really needs to know and write about that. True, this tactic might not get you new readers at first, but it’ll definitely make your current readers stay. Also, in time, your blog could be known as a resource which newbies could refer to.

I know you use a CMS. I bet majority of you are used to WordPress’s WYSIWYG visual editor. However, that doesn’t mean you should totally forego trying to learn the basics of HTML coding. Those who have their own blogs have all the time to learn by experience. But for Probloggers for hire, you need to know the basics. I can’t count the number of job ads I see wherein you’re required to know the basics of HTML. There might be one gig which would require you to use other CMS than WordPress. Movable Type, for example, doesn’t have WYSISWYG editor. Although there are buttons meant for HTML coding, it’s still beneficial to know the codes behind them.

1. Bold text

<b>text here</b>
OR
<strong>text here</strong>

2. Italicized text

<i>text here</i>
OR
<em>text here</em>

3. Underlined Text

<u>text here</u>

4. Paragraph breaks

<p>paragraph here</p>

Adding the paragraph tags, for example, to two separate paragraphs would put them in paragraph form on the blog, whereas not doing so might mesh the two paragraphs together, depending upon your CMS.

5. Lists

For ordered lists: <ol>insert list here</ol>
For unordered bulleted lists: <ul>insert list here</ul>

To specify each element of the list, use: <li>element</li>

So, for example I’m making an unordered list, it would look like this:

<ul>

<li>element 1</li>
<li>element 2</li>
<li>element 3</li>

</ul>

6. Insertion of pictures:

<img src=”insert pic address here”>

7. Picture alignment

If you want your pics to be enveloped by text, you can use the “align” attribute. For example:

<img src=”insert pic address here” align=”left/right/center”>

8. Insertion of links

<a href=”insert link here”>Anchor text or the text that would appear visible onscreen</a>

9. Opening links on a new window

Insert the term target=”_blank” inside the codes bracket.

<a href=”insert link here” target=”_blank”>Anchor text</a>