💬 Blogging Q&A

Richard, as always, I love your openness to not only share resources, but also your thoughts. I really enjoyed your Q&A and agree with your recommendation of Edublogs and WordPress.org. I also really liked your point about having a notebook for ideas. I must be honest, I use Trello to keep my ideas, but the point is that things come to life long before the literal blog post starts.

My only concern was your comment from Guy Kawasaki to just write great posts and people will find them. I disagree. Not because I think that I write great stuff that has not been found, but rather because I do not think that it is that simple.

I really liked a post Bill Ferriter wrote on this topic, in which he said:

Audience is a function of the content that you create, the consistency of your creation patterns, the length of time that you’ve been creating, the opportunities that you have to be in front of audiences in the real world, the relationships that you have with people who have audiences larger than you do — and, as frustrating as it may seem, serendipity.

His answer is instead to ‘Bring Your Own Audience’. As he explains:

The most powerful members of your audience are those people that you ALREADY have an intellectual relationship with. Maybe they are folks in your school that you have lunch with every day. Maybe they are buddies from other schools in your district that you meet for beers a few times a month. Maybe they are colleagues that you hang with once per year at teaching conferences around the country.

Those are the people who are the most likely to stop by your blog or respond to your Tweets and challenge your thinking — so instead of trying to build a huge audience of strangers, concentrate on building a small audience of peers.

I think that whether it be blogging in the classroom or starting a professional blog, the best thing that you could do is find a few people who you really want to share with and start there.