Do you know who the king of magic is? I know that most of you will answer it as Harry Houdini. Yes, Harry Houdini is the answer. His magic is so popular that sometimes he is referred as the king of magic (at least to me, he is the king of Magic. Note, that I haven't seen his magic ; all of my knowledge comes from books). So, Let's start our post, let's take a look at what Houdini can teach us about blogging :-
Practice making blogging magic
If I wanted to be more precise, I would call Houdini the King of Handcuff Magic or Escape or something like that. For a magician, it takes a lot of time and practice to perform the trick in the right fashion. In this case, Houdini could teach us that “Practice makes perfect”. Many of the new bloggers come to this field in hope making easy money in a short time span. But the real case is absolutely different. You need to invest a lot of work to get the right results. At first it might be little hard to keep up with blogging, to blog. But once you get the hang of it, you will be a great blogger. To become a great blogger (which means a greater thinker, writer, promoter, networker and commenter), you need to work hard, you need to practice.
Practice Thinking – Think like a Bird !
Take a piece of paper or open up Word. Think about what you know (about blogging). Write down the things that come to your mind. Take about 15 minutes to do so. After you have written down the topics that came to your mind, categorize them, based on topics and subtopics. Each little thing in blogging is related to something else. Draw a small chart that shows the connection between the topics that came to your mind. After you have done that, think again. Think of various (other) subtopics that might go into each topic/sub-topic. Do this, for 1 hour. This is a great exercise because it will help you to think in a better fashion, with limited time (it will also give you unique topics to write about). I would recommend that you keep “blogging” as the center of your chart, from blogging, you could derive topics and subtopics, from which you could get more ideas to write about. While you perform this task, be sure to think of everything in this world that is related to blogging (in fact, everything is). Make connections, note down analogies. These will help you greatly when it comes to explaining. I would recommend that you practice free thinking (as I call it) every day for about half an hour. It has helped me greatly to think of ideas related to blogging (in fact, I got the idea for this blogging magic post from free thinking)!
Practice Writing – Write like a Pro !
In order to conjure up your blogging magic, you don't want to be “too formal”, neither do you want to be “too informal”. As a blogger, you need to be something in between. You should be formal, because blogging is a business, and businesses are formal. You shouldn't be formal because your audience is (more likely) to be other blogger or want-to-be blogger. That is, your audience aren't professors. 😉 Just like free thinking, you need to practice writing. But, I would recommend you to write about ideas (and publish it on your blog). Whether its good or bad, you will know it, as soon as you hit the publish button (it may take some time) :D. If you are afraid to publish (fear to failure), then ask other bloggers to read your draft and write a review about it. Note : Send you drafts/articles only to honest bloggers. Ok, if you don't like either of the options that I mentioned above, you would evaluate the article for yourself. Read and score it after some time (preferably after 1-2 days). Note : You may also practice “free commenting” in the same fashion. Write a comment and evaluate it, or publish it, or send it for review.
Should I practice networking and/or promoting ?
Absoutely, I have no answer. The only answer I can give you here is that you could do it, incase if you have some new strategies in hand. You could implement your new ideas into your promotion and networking strategy. Other than that, I don't think that there is much you could do about networking. The same thing applies for promoting. You could try put some new strategies for promoting, but you can't neccesarily practice it.
More blogging magic
Now, that I have talked about practice, I would like to mention some other elements here. Passion, dedication, determination and hard work are some other things that Houdini. Since, I have already talked about this in my old post – What all do you need for blogging ? I am not going to repeat it. But, you have the option to check it out (and I would recommend you do so) or try using the Copywriting Scorecard for Bloggers. Anyway, I thank you guys for taking time reading my article. Thank you for tuning it. I also like to thank Ms. Ileane for giving me the oppurtunity to share some of my blogging magic here.
