What Does A Blogger Do? Top 38 Things

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What Blogging is All About?

What do you do as a blogger? What is blogging anyway?

If I had a penny for every time I heard this, I’d be living in Maui and doing yoga on the beach and basking in the glory of Mother Nature’s sea turtles, humpback whales and spinner dolphins everyday, but you know what, I’d probably still be blogging!!!

My lovely readers here are a mix of bloggers and non-bloggers and I think this post will be relevant to both of you:

• My blogger readers will have somewhere to send people who ask them this question and they will do a sanity check with no qualms in correcting me in what I forget to include here.
• My non-blogger readers will get a glimpse into a day in the life of a blogger and perhaps be inspired to come into our world or keep a very long distance. Either outcome is possible here.

So what does a blogger do anyway?

A blogger creates fresh, original content that is consumable by the masses at no charge! (Yes, we are crazy generous and we know it!)

So yes, a good blogger primarily creates content, which you hear referred to in many ways such as blog posts, blog articles, web articles, web copy, content, web content, blog content. This is the stuff you read on a blog page and it all appears in reverse chronological order with the archives dating back to whenever the blogger started this incredible creation journey.

We write for you. We offer you information in digestible and delicious bites about something that is of interest to you. Whatever your interest and passion may be, there is a blogger out there pouring that same exact interest and passion into new, fresh, content for you. All you need is your [real] best friend and today, we all have the same one, the one we cannot live without, the one and only Google.

We, bloggers, bring you authentic and genuine content. We do this for free, as in completely free of charge and obligation, every day, all year long. We create this original content from the depths of our hearts and it flows even from the exhaustion of our fingertips. We put it up on our blogs for you to consume at your leisure, now, tomorrow, a month down the road, whenever it should strike your fancy.

This content creation part, which can often take up ridiculously long amounts of our time and effort, drives all of us crazy at one point or another — pro bloggers have been known to admit to this on live “radio” (podcasts!) – because creating something new and refreshing and original over and over — and over, as you can imagine, is not easy. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and write just one single polished, entertaining, juicy, and original paragraph about a topic of your choice for 10 days straight and report back to us here.

To a blogger, there are two types of people in the world: the ones who read her blog and the ones who don’t. The sexiest and sweetest thing you can tell a blogger is that you will subscribe to her blog and the kindest thing you can ever do is to share her blog posts, which you immensely enjoyed, with someone else (instead of forwarding those stupid, ridiculous chain emails with complete rubbish, forward a blogger’s newsletter with information that may actually change someone’s life for the better.).

We watch your reaction like a hawk: Do you like it? Do you share it? Do you leave us a comment? Do you do something differently in your life and then take a moment to tell us so that we feel an unspeakable fulfillment for a few moments? Or do you arrive quietly, read quickly, and leave?

Still, no matter what that reaction may be, no matter how silent our readers may be, or how tiny the human circles that share our content, we turn around and do it again the next day.

You may call it insanity. We call it blogging.

Content creation continues to be the king and queen of the process, it is the golden nugget in a blogger’s life and it is the single contributing asset to a blogger’s rise and fall, when all is said and done.

A blogger’s life is a very busy one and a blogger’s work is never done. For those of you with an intense curiosity about our world, I will give you a glimpse into mine.

A Day in the Life of a Blogger:

1. Create fresh, original content a few times a week for your own blog.
2. Use images that truly compliment your content or use Flickr’s Creative Commons photo gallery to use a unique touch to your blog post.
3. Research other blogs with similar content and sites with great reference material and linking from your blog posts.
4. Establish your online presence on all social media — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook- platforms and learn the best ways to use them.
5. Keep up with all the dynamic changes on each of the social media platforms, at a minimum.
6. Update your credits page with all your media and major mentions and all the guest posts you have written.
7. Share your content on social media, encouraging conversation and
8. Manage comments, spam, compliance with your [implied] policy, and reading and replying to each one on your own blog.
9. Guest Blog at least once or twice a month by creating fresh, engaging content for another blog.
10. Reply to comments on every guest post that you write.
11. Engage with every single reader who contacts you or asks a question.
12. Run the back-end such as your publishing platform, your plugins, your design, your code, smoothly. This changes all the time if your blog is growing at any rate.

13. Start with the right hosting company please, something you cannot afford to mess up.
14. Fix problems with your website. This one can go from 5 minutes a day to 3 hours a day. It just depends.
15. Optimize your top pages, top blog posts and your services and product pages.
16. Research every opportunity that comes your way such as advertisers and promotional inquiries and deciding which works best for you at your current stage of blogging.
Communicate with your peer bloggers and support each other.
17. Build relationships online and offline with your community and always be ready to do something for your blogging community.
18. Use Skype or other phone services to do a phone or video interview with those new relationships.
19. Give interviews — in fact, accept every single interview no matter how big you ever get and always give as much value to that audience as you can.
20. Beta test for plugins and work with developers to test applications on your site.
21. Support your community by following other blogs, by sharing your knowledge and giving to your fellow bloggers.
22. Endorse the products that you use and love and trust and use an honest strategy to tell your audience about it.
23. Establish consulting services with your blogging knowledge and any other skills and experience to help others.
24. Set up your newsletter such as Aweber, learn how to maintain it, and be smart and sincere with your email marketing strategies.
25. Set up and maintain a Facebook fan page, understand that some people only use Facebook but can still benefit from your message.
26. Set up a strong LinkedIn presence and engage in groups and provide value to conversations.
27. Prepare for each consultation with your clients by doing serious prep work and post follow-up.
28. Educate yourself constantly with free webinars, online courses, and tons of other material in your niche and about blogging, business, and marketing in general.
29. Do the books especially if your blog is your business and if you have set it up as a business.
30. Take care of the legal stuff like Trademark, set up an S-Corp or LLC or a sole proprietorship and find an accountant for your taxes.
31. Attend conferences at least once a year and learn the latest and greatest as well as build new connections.
32. Speak to a group about your expertise or share your story and prepare well for that speech in advance with everything you got.
33. Set up a podcast and expand your audience and your brand by reaching people who prefer an audio medium.
34. Track your stats using Google Analytics enough to know which direction you are headed, be sure Google can find you, where your referrals are coming from and what is happening on your site. Then make smart business decisions based on that.
35. Collaborate on projects with other bloggers such as a fun eBook — Life Lessons project was a collaboration of 108 bloggers — or on another creation.
36. Create your own products; this can be in the form of an epic product with audio interviews, worksheets and a guide book or a Kindle book or an e-course or a video series or many other things. This one can take the most amount of time in bursts but once it is done, it gains the blogger credibility and potentially income.
37. Do it with enthusiasm and passion and excitement because no blogger can survive, much less, thrive without it.
38. Everything else that I surely forgot in the list that keeps on growing :)!

Listen, this is not even all of it and if I were to tell you how much time and effort goes into each of these single lines, your jaw would drop and you would run fast and far from the thought of ever becoming a blogger. But there is a reward, a sense of fulfillment, and a giant dose of blessing that a blogger feels for creating that content and sharing it with the world. It is inexplicable and just like chocolate and Italian gelato, you must taste the experience first hand before knowing what I am talking about.

Wooh, I am off my soap box, my darling and patient readers, but please, don’t leave without telling me what you think?

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