Blogging consists of writing regular short articles about your topic. You can host a blog on your own website, or you can use a blogging platform like Medium (link) or Tumblr (link).
The advantage of hosting on your own platform is that you control your content for as long as you host the platform, and you have greater control over archiving your work. However, this takes some work to set up, there’s a cost to hosting your own website, and it doesn’t have the reach of some of the other platforms. An advantage of hosting on a platform like Medium, is that these platforms are free to use and often have community recommendation algorithms, meaning that your post could potentially be pushed to people on the platform community for greater visibility. The disadvantage is if anything happens to the site in the future, or if the site changes its terms of service, there is a possibility you could lose both your content and the audience, since you have less control.
No matter where you choose to host your blog, keep the following best practices in mind:
- Posts should be between 100 and 500 words. If it’s longer than 500 words, split it up into multiple posts over time
- Post regularly – weekly or biweekly so that people know when to expect a new post from you
- Update other social media feeds (if applicable) when you make a blog post so your followers know you have posted long form content
- Use all the best practices outlined in Chapter 2 to make your writing accessible to a broad audience
- Use images to make your post more engaging, and use links to connect to a broader conversation/show attribution.
The next section will discuss visual content, with a particular focus on Instagram and Imgur. You can create visuals for your website or blog, or you can use them across other social networks. Visuals are helpful because they are flexible and can be used with or without text.