Tips for the new (Citytv) blogger

News of Creative Communications students writing blogs has successfully diffused out into the "real world": local media station Citytv shot a news segment in our PR class today to explore this wondrous new genre of college homework.

If you've stumbled across this blog after watching that segment, welcome, and thank you for reading.

It's mid-semester at the college, and after eight weeks of this ongoing assignment, I have some advice for those who are thinking of setting up their own blog:

1. Write for your readership: this is one of the standard rules we are taught in CreComm. Know your audience and shape your writing and ideas accordingly.

After all, unless the blog is acting as an online diary, the purpose of posting your writing online is for others to read it. Sometimes your topic will dictate your audience; other times, choosing your audience will determine which topics you should pursue.

2. Find your "niche": is one of the suggestions our PR instructor, Kenton, gave us when we first began our blogs, and it's a good one. Narrowing down what you talk about to as specific a topic as possible (but still broad enough to ensure you have enough to write about) not only helps you as a writer, but it also helps your readers.

The task of sitting down and writing your next post is daunting enough, never mind having to choose from your wide variety of interests. If you set guidelines for yourself in terms of topics, you'll be better able to focus your creative energies on writing, rather than brainstorming. Even better, if you have a topic in mind, you'll know what to keep for your ears open for, idea-wise, when you're not blogging.

Narrowing down a topic also does your readers a favour. There are a billion blogs out there where people post their thoughts on "random stuff", which, to be honest, is not that fascinating because anyone can have an opinion on anything. Having a blog with structure makes you stand out from this crowd. If someone wants to know what's happening in a particular sphere of the media, like punk music, and you've got a blog on it, they'll know where to go and not have to worry about sifting through stuff they don't want to read to get to the stuff they do.

And similar to what I said above, narrowing down your to topic will help you focus your thoughts, delve deeper, and maybe take a particular angle or touch on things that others have not.

The only problem: finding your niche is difficult to do.

I've tried to center my blog around communications (which is an extremely broad topic in itself), but with a focus on advertising, public relations, journalism, and broadcast media because these are the communication sectors I'm being exposed to in college, so I'm already in the habit of applying what I learn to "the real world".

Even focusing on these four sectors alone is quite broad in itself, but I'm working on narrowing my blog down as I come closer to deciding in which area I want to specialize in my second year.

3. Within your niche, have a "unique selling proposition": I borrowed that phrase from advertising, but it's just as applicable to blogging. Write about something that not a lot of other people are writing about.

Like I said before, anyone can have opinion on anything. Make yours unique. This does not mean you have to go searching for the rarest of the rare of news. If there's something that everyone is talking about, and it interests you as well, then by all means blog about it - but take a different angle.

If everyone's talking about Kanye West and what a jerk he is after the MTV awards, don't fall into the same trap of reiterating everyone else's comments in your own words. Try and approach it from a different perspective, such as whether it was good publicity or bad publicity. Even better - how would you help Kanye save face if you were his public relations person? Or would you?

4. Experiment with blog sites other than Blogger: Although Blogger has the cool techonological-age look that is associated with blogging, it is not without its glitches.

Odd spacing issues, font re-sizing of its own accord, suddenly erasing your entry before you post it, and my personal pet peeve, not being able to copy text from word processing programs, or even from other areas within the same post, into Blogger (this seems to be an issue for Windows PCs only, which makes it difficult when I want to publish a post from the college computers).