Blogging is cheap, easy and fun.



There are so many reasons that I can think of why artists should have blogs rather than websites, that it baffles me that so few are blogging in this country. Some of the advantages of blogging are technical and perhaps may not be easily understood, so today I’m going to skip the technical bits and just concentrate on the more obvious aspects.

Blogs are cheap, in fact they are free in some cases. You can create a free blog with Blogger in 5 minutes. A number of very successful bloggers are using blogger.

Wordpress, however is my favourite blogging service. Hosting365 offer free hosting for wordpress blogs. Your only expense in this case will be to buy your own domain (i.e. your .com address), which costs about 10 EUR when last I looked. That’s your own website and .com name effectively for 10 EUR. Contrast this to the expense of buying a very basic brochure type website from a web developer (EUR500-1000?). This fact alone should be enough to convince artists to use blogs.

We’ve seen already how easy blogs are to use. Everybody is familiar with Microsoft word. In a word document, you type your text, you insert your image and you click save. On a blog you type your text, you insert your image and you click publish. It’s really that easy!

Most artists, who are on a tight budget and uncomfortable with technology, will appreciate those 2 advantages of blogging. However, perhaps the most interesting aspect of blogging is the community element of blogging. Because you have comments on blogs, you will get feedback from readers and other bloggers. Other bloggers will write about you, if you have something interesting to say or present. In this way you can quickly gain exposure and audience, something not so easily done with websites. This aspect of blogging is perhaps not so clear to artists who are new to blogging. It’s only when you have been blogging for a while and have read and commented on other blogs that you learn to fully appreciate this community effect. Community implies a lot of things, friendship, cooperation, organisation, learning from one another, keeping abreast of news within the community and even the occasional infighting (hell, nothings perfect!).

This is my last post in this series on the advantages of blogging for artists. I’ll be sending out the press release for the group blog offer shortly. Back to normality from next week on, I promise.

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