A blog is a great way to market your writing
A blog is a great way to market your writing, and a blog works for new writers as well as experienced writers.
(If you're an experienced writer, did you know that you can get a job blogging for business? Visit Pro Write for our blogging workshop to learn more.)
Lets look at all the advantages of blogging for writers:
Blogging for new writers
If you're a new writer, a blog gives you the confidence and ability to write for an audience.
I've even heard of professional writers admitting to collapsing into tears when they send off work that means a lot to them, so it's not surprising that aspiring writers feel that the process of writing for public consumption is overwhelming.
Your blog helps you to get comfortable with words. Inexperienced writers "write". Experienced writers just say what they're got to say --- you can hear the writer's "voice" behind the words. Developing this voice takes a lot of writing. A blog lets you do that writing in a low-risk, comfortable arena.
Your blog enhances your creativity. Writing begets writing. The more you write, the more you'll have to write about. If you commit to blogging, the knowledge that you need to collect material for your blog stimulates your creativity. You'll come up with ideas for your blog, and for other writing too.
You can use your blog as a writing sample. When you're a new writer, you don't have any credits. This means that editors are hesitant to assign commissions to you. Your blog proves that you can write, and gives a commissioning editor an idea of what your style is like. Add your blog's URL to query letters and proposals that you send to editors, and invite editors to visit your blog. The fact that you have a blog lets editors know that you're serious about writing.
Ready-made writing samples. Before editors will pay you to write, they want to know that you can write. They want clips - copies of material you've published. This seems like a Catch-22: you can only get published if you've been published. Your writing on your blog can be in lieu of clips. Your blog lets editors gauge your abilities and style, before they put down the cash.
Blogging for experienced writers
A blog helps you to build a platform for your writing career. Your platform is a base of readers, people who know you and your work. Your platform is a ready-made audience. Yes, publishing a book will build your platform, BUT publishers want you to have a platform first. If you have a built-in audience, then publishing your books is less risky.
Your blog gives you the courage to find your voice and be yourself. I mentioned voice above. Your writer's voice can only develop with practice. It's as distinctive as a fingerprint. Forensic word-use document analysis proved that Newsweek columnist Joe Klein was Anonymous, the author of the roman a clef novel, Primary Colors. His voice was just as distinctive as yours.
Your blog gives you contacts. The writing world is now global. You have a global audience. This means global competition. This is a good thing. It means increased markets for your work. The blogosphere is a huge collection of bloggers, people who blog for fun, or who blog for marketing and promotion for their business, or some other work-related reason, and bloggers talk to other bloggers.
Your blog, with its RSS feed, permalinks, and comments (see the Glossary) features makes you part of the blogosphere, a social network of bloggers.
People can find you online. Blogs get indexed by search engines FAST. It only took a couple of days for my initial Angela Booth's Writing Blog items to start appearing in Google. With a Web site, you'd expect to get indexed in a couple of months. This means that your blog will get you more readers, faster, than a Web site.