Two Tips to Better Blogging

In the spirit of the ProBloggers 31 Days to Building a Better Blog contest, I am writing a couple of my initial responses. I haven't read every single tip -- there are over 400 as of now -- so what I am writing may be a duplicate.

My first tip is to get everyone you know to blog too. When I started blogging, I was the only adoptive parent who had adopted out of foster care that I knew was blogging. Pretty soon Cindy, Kari, Mary, and Paula had joined me and since then so have others. We have a network and we pretty much read each others blogs every day. We link to each other often. We have never formally discussed promoting our blogs or sharing the link love or anything -- it's just been a natural outflowing of being involved in each others lives.

And my second tip is don't think too much. While there are many others who might tell you the opposite, the success of my blog has been that I just let stuff flow. I don't try too hard to determine what my audience wants or to plan my posts. When something needs blogging, I intuitively know it. There are days when I blog things that are embarrassing to me if I think too much. But at least for this blog, I think that our family experience, as honest as it can be, is what others are wanting to read.

My blogging may be unique among some of those who are reading ProBlogger in that any income generated is last in line after providing a service to other adoptive families, giving myself an outlet for my stress and an opportunity to understand myself as I process my experience, and the support group we've created among other bloggers. But I know that if it were not for my ability to stop thinking sometimes when I post and the group of other bloggers that I know, that I would have earned much less than the few hundred I've earned in the last year.

So again, don't think too much and get all your friends blogging too. It will increase your readership, but it will also make the whole process much more fun.