June 14, 2007

Short-Term Dance Blogging

There's excellent post on Influential Marketing Blog about success strategies for short-term blogging.

Why I didn't think about this idea for dance bloggers before is beyond me - it makes a lot of sense.

Here it is:

Full-time dance blogging is not for everybody. Many dancers and dance companies move from one project to the next, and for time and other reasons maintaining a single blog over a long period of time just doesn't make sense.

So why not create a blog that is intended to be a short-term initiative with a clear beginning, middle and end. This way your audience has a clear expectation of what to expect from your blog, and you and collaborators have a more manageable project of a set duration for which you can prepare.

Another advantage is that short-term blogging, unlike full-time blogs that cover many topics, offers a good opportunity for dancers and presenters to work together to promote this blogging endeavor to their respective audiences.

How-to Guidelines

Building on and modifying recommendations from Influential Marketing Blog post:

1) Plan you blog endeavor well before the actual launch of your blog. For example, if you plan to blog a dance work (rehearsal through performances and aftermath), prepare 3 to 6 months before. Timing depends largely on when the marketing and publicity materials will be prepared. You want to add to all online and offline marketing collateral that you'll be blogging about your performance. You'll also want to describe the nature of your blogging in this promotional literature - video, text, pictures? Behind-the-scenes look at the creation of? Or whatever else you plan to blog about. Whatever you decide, your blogging will probably be devoted to a single topic/project.

2) Register domain name if necessary at sites such as GoDaddy.

3) Set-up your blog. If you're doing it on your own without technical help, the easiest way to get started is with sites such as Blogger, TypePad and WordPress.

4) If you plan to take pictures and videos and upload to Internet and you have no idea how to do this, make sure you have time to experiment, learn how to use equipment and spend time with photo and video software. Feel free to post questions here if you'd like.

5) Think about community. Will visitors be encouraged to post comments? And who will respond in a timely way to these comments? This is really critical. If you're working with team of bloggers, this is much easier to manage.

6) Map-out your time commitment to blogging up-front. Dancing can be all consuming. If you don't set aside specific times during the day and week to blog, it probably won't get done. Another reason why it's good to blog with other people.

7) Market you blog from the beginning. Contact me and other bloggers so you can get your blog listed on as many sites as possible. Within your blog configuration panel, you can automatically have your blog "ping" blog indexing sites that help increase profile for your blog on search engines.

8) Post your multimedia content to popular video and photo sharing sites. This will get you more traffic. Plus, bloggers and others can embed your content into their sites.

9) Prepare people for the end of your blogging. Make sure blog followers know when you're blog will end. And let everybody know what you'll be doing next in terms of dancing. This way your fans can follow you to your current or new website or blog.

10) Try not to make promises that you can't keep when it comes to blogging. I've made this mistake many times and I try to keep this in mind when I'm blogging.

If you know of project/performance-specific dance blogs or you have upcoming plans, please let me know.

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