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Blog Tips
You’ve done it. You’ve made that big move across oceans and continents and you want to tell everyone about it. You like writing and want to share it with the world, so you’ve started a blog.
At first, it all came so easily, tales of cross-cultural bumbles and the sensory overload of a trip to the local market. But now, it’s getting harder to find something that interests you or feels worthy of putting up on a blog.
Posts get more and more infrequent, until the next thing you know, the date for your flight home is tomorrow and you realize that your readers might not even know it. You dash off a final post that sums up several months of experiences and end up leaving many stories untold.
Blogging abroad doesn’t have to be that way. With some planning and foresight plus committing to prioritizing blogging, you can keep inspiration sparking throughout your time abroad.
If you are feeling like your blog has stagnated, or you are getting ready to start a blog and want to avoid the fate described above, ask yourself these questions about your platform to take your blog to the next level.
What am I trying to say?
Are you trying to take a broad and encompassing view of the country you live in or are you trying to share the small stories from your community and network? Are you trying to spin a yarn that could put New Yorker narratives to shame, or are you doing fact-based reporting? Are you and your reflections a part of your posts or are they observances of culture around you?
Thinking about what you want to say can help to give your blog a voice and distinction from other bloggers out there. Consider this your North Star: when you’re feeling at a loss for inspiration, think about what you are trying to say and post ideas may start rushing to you again.
Your blog’s voice should be a reflection of you and your writing style and what is interesting to you. Your enthusiasm will come through in your writing, and by giving your blog a theme and voice, readers will come to know what to expect when they see your latest posts.
How am I trying to say it?
There are many different ways of crafting a blog post. Mix it up and experiment with how different formats can enhance the voice you’ve given your blog.
Maybe that means having a weekly recurring themed post, like a Photo Friday or Monday’s Inspiration. Having a post format that happens at regular intervals can help keep you on track and make idea generation easier.
Maybe it means delving into your more creative writing well and telling one story, week by week, broken up into a several posts. Having a serialized story can take the pressure off of trying to tell a new story in each post, and also really allow the details of your life to breathe and come off the screen.
Maybe it means coming up with broad themes for each month and doing some extra work to research more into each topic. Thinking of a theme, like local music, can give you an opportunity to learn more about an aspect of your host culture that maybe you only had cursory interactions with and can provide you with some new conversation topics to talk to your community about.
However you decide to structure your blog posts, having some kind of consistency in structure can make inspiration easier to find.
When am I trying to post?
This is something that can be the hardest thing to maintain: a regular posting schedule. Once you have settled into your community abroad, take a moment to take stock of what your days look like and what your Internet accessibility looks like. You don’t need to have constant Internet access to post multiple times a week, or even consistently.
Think about the post formats that you want to have each week. That may be multiple, recurring formats or it may be a consistent narrative writing style. Once you take stock of the kinds of posts that support your blog’s theme and voice, consider how much of a time commitment it is for you to write those posts. Maybe your Photo Friday is something that you can dash off in 15 minutes, while an interview with local community members takes a couple of hours to translate, condense and edit. This is different for everyone, and may change over time as your blog grows.
Once you’ve taken a realistic look at how much time it takes for you to craft the posts for your blog, you can see how it fits into your weekly schedule, which can then help you set an editorial schedule. Look at a calendar and take some notes for when each post will be published. This will allow you to set deadlines for yourself and help you to plan your writing schedule. Upload the posts to your blog when you have Internet access, and take advantage of that “Schedule” function. Keep a sticky note somewhere on your desktop with a list of dates that blog posts go up, with a note about the post’s topic, or set reminders on your phone or computer.
In the end, maintaining consistency in the frequency of your posts will help your audience know when to check in and give you some kind of accountability for keeping up with your blogging endeavor.
Whether your blog is brand new or is several years old, these are questions worth revisiting each time you start to lose inspiration. Think about some of your favorite blogs and how their authors might answer these questions, and check out some other blogs that your friends and family like to read. It may give you an idea of the direction you want to go, and make crafting an editorial roadmap a bit easier.
This is a guest post by Christine Bedenis, a well-traveled twenty-something from the Midwest. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Thailand) and was a winner of Peace Corps’s annual Blog It Home contest in 2014.
