Thank you Kiama bloggers

Hi All

Thanks again for your great work in today’s blogging course. I thought you were all doing very well and you were excellent company. The main thing now is to find out how you can use that knowledge and what you actually want to write about. Think a bit more about it.  See your blog as a work in progress. Start with a Theme, but if you change your mind..try something else. See if you like it better. Show it to other people. And make your site more interesting with images, videos and, not to forget, links. Find a few other good sites and link to them. Hopefully they link back to yours in the future. Don’t forget to create additional Pages (About Me, Contact Us, Events, What We Do). The combination of Posts and Pages works really well.

We covered a lot of ground, but there is of course more. If you have any questions or want some advice (not just from me, but other readers may have some ideas too), add a COMMENT here and I will try to answer you or point to some helpful resources.

Now, I started the course with that famous question: To Blog or Not To Blog …that is the question!! But what is your answer?

This example also shows how you can use Polls in your Post.

Thanks again and don’t forget to ask.

Career Moves?

By now the corporate world has fully discovered the potential of blogging.  CEO’s love to write their own blog and tell us all about their fabulous new products and great plans for the future. But they use blogs also in another way. Organisations find blogs very useful as a new way of communication with and between staff. Its strongly interactive character, inviting people to respond and start conversations, does work remarkably well and seems to be the best way to find out what people think and feel about important issues in the organisation. For employees it is a very direct way to express their opinion. Often they can publish posts themselves. Blogging can be a good way to get better known in the company and to enhance your profile.  So participate as much as you can, it may get your career moving.

Just don’t get carried away. Management will always tell you how much they love to hear what you think and how they encourage open and frank discussions. No doubt, but it does not always work exactly that way, does it? There have been some well-published cases where employees got sacked because of what they had written in their blogs or comments.

Still a career move…Well yes…just the wrong direction.

Hello new Kiama bloggers!

Welcome to our blog about blogging. Blogging got really popular over the last couple of years. By now there are millions of blogs in our blogsphre. Blogs about politics, sport, music, gardening, your dog, horses, traveling, Australia…you name it it is there somewhere. Some are funny, some  interesting or personal, others are fascinating. So why would you blog?

Why Blogging – 200 million bloggers can’t be wrong
Blogging is a great way to share with others how you think about subjects you are interested in or passionate about. That can be anything. And once you know the basics, blogging is rather  easy to do. Write some text, maybe add an image or video and there you go. With a single click you have published your article on the internet for everyone to read. Great, isn’t it? A bit scary too, maybe. But don’t let that discourage you. Remember that you don’t need to write the great Australian novel. Just write a few paragraphs about something you like or care about. Don’t think too long. Write it down and see how other people react to that. If they don’t, that’s ok too.

But before you start, give yourself a bit of time to think and plan ahead. Ask yourself what you want to write about and who is likely going to read it. You may want to save the text first as a draft and publish it later.

Blog around the Clock
It is important to keep writing, as often as you can. And tell other bloggers about your blog. Find blogs that you like, leave comments and add those sites to your blogroll. And don’t forget to ask them to do likewise for you.

Best Kept Secret
You can have the best blog in the world,  but if you are not spreading the word, no-one will even read what you had to say. That happens a lot and it is one of the reasons that people stop writing. They never get any comments, so why bother.  It doesn’t have to be like that. The blogsphere is a interactive world and if you start participating you’ll find out that people discover your blog and have something to say.
Good Luck!