Here’s what I learned from Suzanna Stinnett—author, blogger, consultant, and founder of the Bay Area Bloggers Society—in an interview with Mike Wolpert of Social Jumpstart TV about the beautiful art form of blogging.

Stinnett’s Advice About Starting a Blog

-If you don’t understand the technology, you might feel really stuck. But the technology of starting a blog has actually become very easy. With either WordPress or Blogger, it only takes 2-3 minutes to create a blog. Help is available; reach out and get it!

-Beyond the technology, you might freeze up when it’s time to hit “Publish.” If this is you, go back to these questions: What is it you want to say to people? What do you know about how to say it? Being clear about these questions will help you get up the guts to hit the “Publish” button.

-Take deep breaths, and take a lot of breaks. Blogging is a human experience. You might be going too far, getting too frustrated, or having a slow connection that day. It’s easy to get so frustrated that you don’t go back. Walk away and come back later in a better frame of mind.

Stinnett’s Advice About Having a Great Blog

-Here’s what blogs need to focus on: a story that can be shared, that engages people, and that they want to go out and tell others about. Never forget this basic principle.

-The blog is your front porch. You decorate it, bring out the furniture, and create a place where you can invite people to come in and see what you’re doing. They might come from social media, and you can send them back out to different places. But there’s a comfort level when someone has a nice-looking blog with consistent content on it, and readers know they can go there. That’s what they’re going to bookmark.

-Think of your blog in terms of a warm greeting. Keep the focus on your viewer, your customer, your reader. This will make it much easier to make decisions. What is their experience?

-New bloggers tend to start out by trying to present themselves. This needs to look like me; I want people to know who I am. That’s a natural place to start. But it’s much more effective to think of who your potential readers are. How do they feel when they come here? What can you have on your front porch that’s really attractive to your audience?

-Another mistake bloggers make is trying to be “too PhD” in their blog posts. Blog posts shouldn’t be the length of short stories. Long posts like that aren’t getting to the point, or getting to a call to action for the reader. Short is almost always better. You can publish your short stories on Kindle!

-Writing is isolating, but blogging is even more so. Find a place where you can talk with real human beings—maybe even in person!—about your blog. Meeting in person helps to normalize the technology. What Stinnett has found at BABS meetings is that people have learned about something, studied it, heard about it, and looked at it online, but when they come and sit with a group of people and bounce the ideas off each other, it’s different. They have the a-ha moment: now I understand why I need to do this kind of blog, or what a category is, or how the experience is for my readers. A-ha moments happen more in person than they do online.

The How-To’s and Wherefores of Blogging

-Stinnett is a WordPress person herself (like her friend Social Jumpstart). WordPress offers “quite a world,” and the learning curve is short. But she also sends a lot of people to Blogger (which is owned by Google), because she thinks it may be even easier, and it has some advantages. On Blogger, it’s easier to get recognized in some ways, because of Google. You have ready access, and the connections are more seamless, when you want to bring in video (Google also owns YouTube). “Click, click, and you’ve got your blog set up.” And there’s strength in having a Gmail account, which you need for Blogger. Google Plus is also coming into the picture, and it’s another fairly seamless way to put up a post and link it to your blog. There’s a high search engine ranking there.

-However, don’t be too concerned about how you’re being found. Your content is what’s really going to nail your discoverability. Always go back to the basic principle: having a story that can be shared.

-The blog is where it all goes down. If you’re asking, Can I just use Facebook as my blog? the answer is no. Instead, start with a simple blog—maybe just post once a month. This way, you have a core little world that you own. You don’t own your Facebook world. You can’t really dictate your reader’s experience on Facebook, the way you can on your blog.

Stinnett’s Advice for Writers & Authors

-Everybody has a different way to produce their material. You can do a book of interviews: go back and forth between interviewing people in your industry and talking about what you do. Or, if you have clients, think about case studies; people are very interested in case studies. Another option is to use your blog to build up a collection over a period of time, knowing that this is going to be a book—going back and turning your blog posts into a book can work very well.

-Authors’ lives are very interesting to readers, so authors have an edge. Biographies are popular. Stinnett recently realized that now that authors are having viable, clear success with their platforms, they’re doing two things: 1. Hi, I’m the author of _______, and I have something to say. 2. I got up this morning and had to take my dog to the vet. If you’ve published writing that people like, the readers are already there, and they want to know about your real life.

-In 2000, when she was working on the project that became Little Shifts, Stinnett starting seeing weblogs online and thought: this is going to be the opportunity for writers to put themselves out into the world on their own. It took ten years, but we do now have a robust system that writers, business people, and entrepreneurs can use to get the word out about what they’re doing, and to publish books. Amazon/Kindle has become the king of the eBook world. We’re in a whole different place than we were ten years ago.

-A lot of people are reading on their smartphones, even when they have tablets as an option. The phone is so easy, and it’s already in your pocket. It’s easy to pick up where you left off. You need to be thinking about the delivery of your eBook in very simplified forms, for all the different readers and for mobile. This is an important aspect of creating your content.

-If you have video on your blog and you’re going to convert the blog into an eBook, you have to think about what you’ll do with the content in that video. We’re close, but not yet to the point where it’s seamless to include multimedia in your eBook—it’s still experimental. So think about how not to lose that content in the transition.

-eBooks can be quite short. 30 pages is a good length.

Stinnett’s Advice for Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs

-A key element in social media is to create a place people can come to and feel like they belong. Then they are invested. You can turn a customer into a supporter. There’s a big difference: investment in your success. They’re going to bring their family and friends along; they’re going to build your community for you.

-A blog post can be about your staff, your customers, or your community. Use the social networks to meet and greet people and bring them in. Decorate your front porch! Your digital presence is as important as your physical building and the things you build.

-Entrepreneurs have a special kind of magnetism. You create curiosity: Will this person be able to pull this off? And you have a lot of explaining to do, which is actually an advantage in social media. You often have to create new words, because you have to do a lot of educating. If you can actively present your story and allow people to feed in, you will succeed, because lots of people want to feel like they contributed to a project, like some of their intelligence is in there. Entrepreneurs have to be real and human, but it doesn’t always have to be positive. You can write, Everything blew up today. We’re taking the day off and going to the beach. This honesty helps to create human interaction and make people feel like they’re part of something.

-It all goes back to creating a story that can be shared. Small business has the hardest job, because your product might not have a very exciting story to it. But there’s a more important question: what are you doing that’s engaging? Bigger businesses create their own place in the community by giving back, and you can do the same thing on a smaller scale.

-Do something with children, or help the community in another way. It’s a win-win: you’re building up a community, and now you have a story you can share. You can talk about how you’re trying to do better in the world. This gives your company more meat; it’s a competitive edge.

-This time in social media favors small businesses. It’s actually more difficult for huge businesses. Stinnett agrees with our own Mike Wolpert that having 5,000 followers on Facebook is not actually social media engagement. The challenge for big corporations is that there’s no real person there, and nothing to engage with. It’s difficult to write a story—We care, and we’re doing this for our community—when they’re so removed from their community, because of their size. For once, you small business owners and entrepreneurs have an advantage. Use it!

-Social media is driving us toward a better world by prompting us to think about how we are in the world. We can try to be better in the world, and then we can tell people about that.

Suzanna Stinnett Takeaway

The explosion of social media is “an exciting time for small businesses, a brilliant time for entrepreneurs, and about time for writers.” Hallelujah!

(To find out more about Suzanna Stinnett and BABS, go to her website.)

Author : Alexa Weinstein