It’ll drive traffic to your website! It’ll get your name out there! Everybody’s doing it!
The peer pressure is on. You’ve decided to start a blog. But don’t start spewing your brilliant insights into the Internet just yet! Founding your blog without proper forethought is like putting on a recital in a town you’ve never been to with a program covering Dowland lute songs, verismo opera, and rock-musical hits; not advertising it; and refraining from rehearsing with the accompanist you’ve never met. If you wouldn’t do that in your musical life, why would you commit its equivalent in the blogosphere? Before you begin your journey in self-publishing, here are some questions to ask yourself.
1. What’s your objective?
You’ve probably heard a lot of hype about what a blog can do for you. But it’s good to narrow it down to exactly what specific benefits appeal to you the most. Of course, we all want work—but if you’re imagining that some A-house conductor is reading your blog in the middle of the night and will decide to champion your career based on your moving life story and embedded witticisms, you might have to bring it down to Earth a little.
There are plenty of things that actually can be achieved through a blog. Do you want to increase traffic to your Web presence? Google results are blog friendly, and the sheer amount of words in a blog means that you will come up in that many more search results. Do you want to score free tickets to your local opera company by writing reviews? Many PR departments (including larger houses) are realizing the importance of digital publicity and actively reaching out to bloggers. Do you want to expand your studio by blogging about technique and career advice? People search for new interests online first, and a series of essays on technique from you is going to generate interest more than an ad in the phone book.
Getting clear on what you’re after will help you decide on consideration number two.
2. What kind of blog?
“A singers’ blog, of course!” Not so fast. There are a lot of ways to go about this, and you’ll want to make a clear decision before you begin. Is the blog going to be about you or is it going to be deliberate advice to the public? Is it going to be instructional or entertaining? Is it going to focus on a single project or a general perspective? If your answers to all of these are “Both!” then you need to focus a little more clearly. Sure, it will be both. A comedy has touching moments and a tragedy contains irony, but the show will still fall into one category or the other.
Here are a few basic blog templates:
• “This is what a singer’s life is really like!” Your antics, the drama, the ups-and-downs, the wacky neighbor, the wisdom you learn.
• “This is what you should do.” Direct advice, whether on technique, presentation, or whatever people are dying to know.
• “I’m doing something you want to do.” An audition tour, a doctoral degree, recording an album—the audience would be someone who wants to do the same thing and is interested in learning from your experience.
Of course there are variations, and your topics and voice may shift as you go along. But most moderately successful blogs will fall into one of the above, or similar, categories.
3. Anonymity or not?
Basically, are you going to use your real name or a pen name? There are reasons to do it either way. If you are trying to establish your real-life persona in a field—whether it’s performance, pedagogy, or writing—you’ll want to use the same name in your blog as you do in your career. On the other hand, if you step on a few toes or commit an intellectual or diplomatic gaffe, your colleagues will know who to be angry at.
Keep in mind that there are different levels of anonymity. If you hide your name, but share details of your public career, it will be easy for interested parties to discover your identity.
4. How openly will you share?
If you’re showing the ups-and-downs of your career, that means you have to include the downs! To what extent are you willing to jeopardize your professionalism to truly engage your audience with the down-and-dirty truth? There’s no right answer—you have to decide what shade of gray suits you best.
5. Will you link to it from your website?
Is your blog going to be an integral part of your website or a hidden tidbit for people to stumble upon? Will it be linked to from the top of every page, along with “Music” and “Videos,” or will you maybe include it in the “Extras” section, exclaiming “Check out my blog!”?
Some people don’t link to their blog from their websites, but they link to their website from their blog. What you decide will reflect how closely tied to your professional presentation your blog is. Is it on the front page or back in the funnies? Of course, anyone who wants to can find it anyway, but how prominently you display it might affect your writing style.
6. How familiar are you with the blogosphere?
If you don’t know what the blogosphere is, you have a lot of research to do before you put pen to paper . . . er . . . fingers to keyboard. Blogging is not just an informative, entertaining, game-changing force of the Internet—it’s a community. Top bloggers know each other, at least online—and if you don’t go to the block parties, don’t be surprised when nobody comes to your barbeque.
Are you currently reading blogs? What kind? How many? Just the really popular ones, or are you supporting the underdogs? And just as important, are you commenting regularly or just sitting on the sidelines? As soon as you start blogging, you’ll realize that the vast majority of readers, whether subscribers or one-timers, never speak up—they just take whatever they get from your writing and stay in the shadows.
That might be you. But you’ll get a lot more respect from the blogging community if you give more than you expect to receive—and I mean thoughtful conversation, not just plugging your own blog.
7. How’s your writing?
Are you a good writer? Are you sure? It’s one of those things people seem to have a lack of self-awareness about, like whether or not they’re a good singer. Why don’t you find a friend whose writing style you do admire, whether a published journalist or another blogger, and see if they’ll give you feedback on a short entry or two? And not just say “That’s good advice” and then forget about it, but actually do it.
If you don’t have the guts to ask a trusted friend for their feedback, why are you going to publish to the world at large and face the cruelty of anonymous commenters? Or, more likely, the lingering silence that might be the only hint that you’re not doing a good job.
8. Do you have time for this?
People touting the benefits of blogging often leave out the fact that the ROI is not necessarily outstanding—that is, it’s not like you invest a tiny amount of time and reap a huge harvest of Web attention. It’s more like you invest an enormous amount of time and can sort of hope to get out of it what you put into it.
Every time you blog, you are self-publishing. You need to write a rough draft and do your own research; embed all the links, images, sounds, and videos; and edit yourself—all before you hit the “post” button. Writing a decent and well-thought-out blog post can be an entire evening’s project—for which you’re not getting paid. And possibly no one will read it.
Do you seriously have time for this? Sure, you can write a post once every couple of months and no one will complain. But it looks amateurish when people come to your site and see that you haven’t posted in 10 months, and it will disincline them to take you seriously.
Plus, you will never gain a following among the non-RSS crowd (people who don’t subscribe to feeds through a reader or through email, but just bookmark your page and check it regularly). These people will visit sites that update about every day, as those pages become a part of their daily Internet routine. Disappointingly to the tech-savvy, these uninitiated-to-Google-Reader surfers make up a large proportion of blog readers, and if they don’t think you’re worth visiting every day, they probably will forget to visit you at all.
These considerations aren’t meant as a deterrent, but rather as inspiration for some serious brainstorming you’ll want to do before you start off on this labor-intensive, but rewarding, path. After all, you’re a classical singer: Labor-Intensive-But-Rewarding is pretty much your middle name.
