I have been an avid and experimental blogger now for over 2 years, and recently friends, family, and complete strangers have approached me asking for tips and advice on how to get started. So, in the spirit of being a newbie (I’m going on week four at TBG!), I decided perhaps it’s time to share some of my ideas on how individuals should start to think about blogging and join the community. Many of these points may seem rudimentary and pronounced to us folks in the digital marketing industry, but to those who are not, I understand blogging can be a pretty intimidating endeavor. So, here are a few steps that may help to guide newcomers navigating through the blogosphere:

Familiarize and Educate
Like any other new life trial, the first step individuals interested in blogging should take is to get familiar with exactly what a blog is and its role on the internet. Sure, anyone can hit-up Wikipedia and find that a “blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” But that sounds so text book, and most importantly, very one-way, eh? The absolute most important function of a blog from my perspective is that it is, in most cases, not just a website and should not be treated as a repository for forcing a message, but rather it is a two-way communication tool, a very Web 2.0 concept. No longer are people and brands allowed to market via “shouting” their message at consumers (one-way); but now consumers and individuals interested in the same or parallel topics can take part in the conversation by commenting on a post, or writing a post on their own blog to communicate a message or idea to spark the conversation. It is this two-way conversation that I think is the most powerful aspect of blogging and a critical piece to grasp when dabbling with blogging, even on the individual level.

Experiment and Participate
Next up, get out there and start participating in the conversation (sorry to sound very Joseph Jaffe but it is true!). Bloggers-to-be should add a few RSS feeds of their favorite blogs to their feed aggregator (mine is Netvibes), start reading on a regular basis, and start commenting. Take that one step further, and start an experimental blog just to get your feet wet using one of the many friendly and easy to use platforms out there that are available at little or not cost, such as TypePad, Blogger, and Wordpress this is what I did to experiment with blogging (I am on my 3rd personal blog!), and there are a some valuable lessons that I learned – which may be obvious – but are excellent rules of thumb for newbies:

• Be transparent and honest. If not, readers are going to see right through you, and either stop reading, or worse, call you out on it


• Do research before writing. Nothing worse than presenting your POV based on mis-information or hearsay


• Be yourself, write in your own voice


• Encourage people to comment and provide their opinion on a given topic


• Don’t spend hours writing and re-writing posts. Blog entries don’t have to be perfect

Evaluate
Once educated and actively participating, if still interested in blogging, it’s important to see what other people are saying about you or your brand/company before you officially launch your blog, and evaluate whether or not it makes sense to start a blog. Set up Google Alerts for your name or brand, and run a search on Technorati or the like. If there’s anything negative circulating in the blogosphere, you need to be prepared. Blogging is risky at times, as people are going to inevitably disagree with you and rebut your ideas, conversations may get heated, and you need to have thick skin from time to time. And finally, if you are still sold on blogging, make sure you define the goals and objectives of your blog, stick to ‘em, and remember to post often to keep people engaged.

So again, here at TBG it’s clear that everyone “gets” how to blog, as I have watched all my colleagues get involved and this space grow exponentially over the last few days since the site launch; but, to all those blog-curious folks out there, it can be intimidating. Take a deep breath and give it a shot!