Part One was posted yesterday, in case you missed it.
Yesterday, I talked about keeping an idea file in your computer. Today, I wanted to talk about some ideas particular to being a Families.com blogger.
First off, Families.com asks that you write a Week-in-Review blog each week, for the previous week (from Saturday to Friday.) If you want to see a Week-in-Review from the Jobs blog, check one out here. I have found that since the set-up is the same each week (Lisa asks that all Review blogs follow the same outline, which she gives to you) I can simply save a barebones review as a template, basically, and then open that document up each time I want to write a week in review. When I’m done writing that week’s review, I simply do a Save As instead of a simple Save, and then save the new blog under that week’s date. I always have the original document to work off of, saving myself a lot of time and energy in writing the same info over and over again. You are required to write 20 blogs per month, and they ask that you write a week in review each week, so that takes care of at least 4 of the 20 blogs for the month. It’s really not very hard to meet that minimum of 20 blogs, I promise.
The other idea I have for writing for Families is not to cram everything into one blog. I could write a very brief summary for becoming a transcriptionist (a medical, legal, or general transcriptionist,) but when I do that, I have managed to write an article that is too broad and too vague to do much good for the reader, while at the same time closing that idea to later blogs (why write about something I have already written about?) Instead of trying to cover everything in one blog, I will try to cover topics with greater depth so that people can actually learn something from my blogs (work from home, it gives you freedom! isn’t something you can learn a whole lot from) and I can, in turn, have a whole lot more to talk about. I have studied to become a medical transcriptionist and have worked as a general transcriptionist, so I have a whole lot of information I could share, much more than could be covered in just one or two blogs. I use that to my advantage.
Does that mean that I should 27 blogs on becoming a medical transcriptionist (which as sad as this sounds, I could easily do that) and name them “How to Become a Medical Transcriptionist Part One” “How to Become a Medical Transcriptionist Part 12″…”Part 23″…”Part 27”? Please don’t. Lisa will kill you, and you happen to be reading my blog, so the last thing I want you to do is die. You seem rather nice, to boot. But if you write blog after blog, naming them part this and part that, Lisa will send you an e-mail telling you to change the name of your blogs. People don’t like numbers, they like words. If you continue to do this, Lisa will eventually be forced to kill you. Again, you’re nice, you’re reading my blogs–I would rather you didn’t die just yet.
Now, I purposefully named this blog “Part Two” just to illustrate this point. It is okay to have a part one and a part two, but a part five or a part sixteen is just too much. Remember: Words, not numbers.
Okay, so now you’ve been hired, you’ve stockpiled blogs (unnumbered, well-named blogs)–what happens when you are actually given the green light and you can start posting the blogs? Well, you are officially a “Junior Blogger” at that point, a topic I will be covering in tomorrow’s blog: Junior Bloggers at Families.com.