Looking for Expansion…

by Eric Pudalov, Community Events Coordinator

Since I’m working from home today, I’ve had several things on the brain. One in particular has been how to keep the blog from getting repetitive, and how to keep up readership.

On Twitter, we follow Emily Weinberg, Blogger/Organizer of Nonprofit Blog Exchange, who regularly posts tips on just this sort of thing. On June 17th, she posted a URL to a blog called FADS (Fight Against Destructive Spin), which gives advice about PR for many different kinds of organizations.

This particular URL, entitled “Blogging Tips: 52 Different Ideas!”, by Gini Dietrich, seemed particularly helpful. One of the first few tips was “Ask your readers what they want you to write about,” which I occasionally do on here, but likely not often enough.

So I’ll start off by asking – is there anything you want to see on here that you haven’t? What do you feel we’re lacking at Georgia Community Support and Solutions’ blog?

Since our WordPress version of the blog is relatively new, it’s understandable that it is an experiment, to some degree. However, the more we network, and the more we blog in general, the greater an audience we hope to reach.

Yet another helpful tip shared by Spin Sucks, the authors of the above blog, was to create content on Associated Content, a.k.a. “The People’s Media Company.” I did mention AC in an earlier blog entry, partly because I write articles for them.

Specifically, Spin Sucks advised re-posting your blog content onto AC, in order to gain readership. Though I’ve only done this on rare occasions, it has worked. Be careful, however…I once wrote an article about GCSS in blog format and then attempted to re-post it on Associated Content, and then one of the editors at AC accused me of plagiarizing…from myself! Unfortunately, I hadn’t written my name on the blog post, so there was no way to prove that I had actually written it.

So, in the case that I try to do this again, I’ll probably have to just have my “byline” written on the blog beforehand.

Finally, they advised using Twitter, of course, but not merely once a day. They advised keeping your account updated regularly with helpful and interesting content…which is almost common sense once you’re familiar with blogging, I suppose.

If the rest of you would like to see the other advice on FADS, click the link above. It was immediately helpful to me…I hope it will be to the rest of you.