As I go about the area extolling the virtues of blogging on Areavoices, I’ve found a few common misconceptions about blogs and blogging in general. They’re often the factors that keep people from setting up a blog. But in most cases they’re not true.
Here are the top five blogging roadblocks:
Blogs are political or inflammatory
You can see why this misconception still exists today. Some of the earliest blogs focused on politics and the blogger often did so in a vicious and inflammatory way. But news producers anxious to fill their 24-hour news hole, flocked to them as quasi-legitimate sources of political info you couldn’t get anywhere else. Their relaxed and every-man tone made for good TV. If that’s the first place you had heard of blogging, that makes for a skewed first impression. And first impressions are tough to change. The fact is only a small fraction of bloggers write about politics. The most popular blogs are actually about food, sports, health, money, family and travel. That’s what people want to read about. For example, our most popular blogger on the Areavoices platform is a photojournalist who writes about Astronomy. Astrobob has a worldwide audience reading his posts.
Blogs are time consuming
They can be, but they don’t have to be. The best blogs are less than 500 words. People sometimes lose interest in longer pieces. Remember you’re not writing a PhD dissertation. Your blog can be casual and conversational. Have fun with it, like writing an email to a friend. And for those people who write press releases, the hard work is already done. You’ve written the content. All you need to do is copy and paste the press release into your blog. Easy as that.
Nobody would be interested in what I want to write about
First of all, so what if that is true? You can blog just for fun. It’s a nice stress reliever. But the fact is there’s a niche out there for just about every activity and hobby. We even have a blogger writing about raising chickens in his backyard. Why not? Someone out there might share your interests. Share you knowledge with them.
Nasty commenters would pollute my blog
The fact is you control your comments. You can completely turn off comments so no one can reply to your posts. Better yet, you can monitor your comments, so when someone chooses to comment on your post you can read it, but unless you approve it, it won’t appear on your blog.
It costs money to write a blog
Not on Areavoices it doesn’t. Our platform is free and easy to use. Just create your blog at www.areavoices.com. Some blogs are chosen to be featured on our Forum Communications websites. Just let me know if you’d like your blog to be considered.
