The Name and Purpose

Well folks… it is finally time. Today marks the very first official day of Blaugust, but as you can see if you follow the Hashtag there has already been quite a bit of traffic related to it as people stretch their limbs and prepare. As the pseudo presenter of this event, the hardest part each year is trying to determine the information that I need to post in order to help people get started. After awhile all of the advise starts to feel very much the same, given that I have participated in several of these sort of events. That said I feel like each year I gather more experience and probably tackle the same topics from a slightly different perspective.

What is your blog?

I think the first and most pressing decision you need to make is ultimately what your blog is going to be. I am focused on blogs since that is really what I do, but the same is true with pretty much any other type of serialized content. You ultimately have to build up a picture in your head of what you want to accomplish and then set forth trying to lay the groundwork to get there. What is it that you do better than anyone else? What fresh perspective can you bring to an existing topic? Of course you don’t have to answer either of those, but there will however be relevant questions in a similar vein that apply to your own project.

The truth is… most of us jump straight into our first blog. I have an elder blog that doesn’t see the light of day because it had some fairly personal content on it. However I just started writing and assumed that was enough. Tales of the Aggronaut was my planned and thoughtful blog experience, and even then I failed to account for all of the things that I would ultimately want it to become. You could take a similar trajectory, but you will probably save yourself a lot of headache if you set forth with a plan in mind. Ultimately at a minimum you should have a picture in your head with what you want to accomplish.

There are as many types as blogs as there are people to write them. However most blogs can somewhat be lumped into a few general categories.

• Project Blog – The idea here is that you are presenting to the world your experience of completing a project. Generally speaking these are tightly focused, and that drives a lot of the content forward. This could be a weight loss journey or learning to speak a foreign language… or honestly anything else that requires sufficient effort and planning and makes for an interesting journey for your readers. The negative of something this laser focused is that when the goal is eventually accomplished… the blog either needs to reinvent itself or fizzles out completely.
• Single Subject Blog – Expanding out from a project you have what I generally think of as a blog that has a single theme. Personally I have seen these most often revolving around a single hobby or in the case of MMORPGs a single video game experience. There have been a plethora of blogs solely devoted to World of Warcraft for example, and I largely cut my teeth in that community. The major positive with this method is that you have a baked in audience that you just simply have to introduce yourself to. Chances are there is already an infrastructure ready to accept you and all you really need to do is get yourself into the mix. The negatives come in when you decide you no longer really fit into whatever that community was. For example Tales of the Aggronaut started as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog… and sorta morphed several times along the way having to reinvent what my purpose was.
• Variety Blog – I’ve always hated the term “variety streamer” because it always seems so damned dismissive, and here given the chance I am doing the same thing to blogging. The idea here is that you have a lot of topics that you want to talk about, but are still largely a topic focused en-devour. A prime example of this would be something like Dulfy.net where she plays a handful of games and digs deeply into depth about them all. These synthesize with your audience pretty well because again you are writing about some easily recognizable subjects. Where these go a little off the rails however is when your fanbase wants you writing about one thing, and you instead are really interested in something else. It is hard to really evenly like and represent a bunch of different subjects, and the folks that only care about one thing will more than likely wander away.
• Personal Blog – This blog is focused on you as a person and your journey through whatever you happen to be doing. At various times during the history of Tales of the Aggronaut I have been several different of these blog types but have ultimately wound up in this category. If you are reading my blog at this point, it is likely because you have bought into me as a human being and are for some reason interested in my opinion. The positive about this style of blogging is that you never need to feel like you should conform to fit in a box. The negative however is that your readership will vary wildly as you vacillate through phases and topics. When I am playing Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft… I pick up readers that care about those things and ultimately deposit them on the sidelines when I move on again.

What to Call It?

Another big decision you need to get out of the way early is what the heck to call your blog. There are a bunch of different ways to approach this, but ultimately you need to wind up with something that is at least somewhat memorable. Ultimately what ends up happening is there will be a group of individuals that only know you as your blog. So there are folks that call me “Aggronaut” for example even though that is the name of the blog and has never been a name I have used anywhere. This is just going to happen because especially if someone finds your writing organically, they are going to know you best as whatever the masthead says.

Ultimately the name of your blog is a deeply personal decision. If I had to go back and do it all again I would have simply registered Belghast.com and be done with it. Instead I was attempting to be cute about it. In my mind I was making a tanking blog and as such I tried to come up with a clever tanky name. Since “naut” as a prefix means to explore or travel, I figured an Aggronaut was someone who navigated and managed Aggro… aka a tank. In the end however it just became a url that people associated with me, and I am not sure if anyone actually broke down the meaning.

As with any of the advice I give, it all should be personalized to your own tastes. However here are some thoughts to keep in mind while choosing a name.

• Keep It Short – You know what people hate? They hate long urls. I am one of those weirdos that doesn’t really use bookmarks and instead types a good number of the URLs that I hit on a regular basis and as such I have a deep appreciation for something that is short and simple. Ask yourself… how would this look on a business card?
• Don’t Box Yourself In – As I stated above… Tales of the Aggronaut has been a blog that has reinvented itself over and over during the ten year run. I have been able to do this fairly fluidly because I have a fairly generic blog name. Had I named it “Belghast’s World of Warcraft Blog” I would have basically signed the deathnote as soon as Cataclysm happened and I faded away from that game. Give yourself an escape clause and pick a name that could have multiple meanings.
• Do Some Research – Spend some time googling your desired name, to make sure that there isn’t another very similar site out there. Also make sure there is nothing terribly heinous being returned with those search phrases. I didn’t know it at the time but apparently there is a band called The Aggronauts.
• Check Into Domains – Sure you might launch your site with the subdomain that comes with Blogger or WordPress, but you might want to see if an actual domain name is available. If you have the spare cash go ahead and register it even if you are not going to use it. If you wind up down to a handful of names this might be a way to sift through which one you should go with.
• Be Catchy – My favorite blog names are the ones that come from other terms… especially commonly used gaming terms. I wish I had figured out something like that when I wound up creating this blog. No one will ever forget the name of “Bio Break” because it is something so universal at this point and as such no one will ever forget Syp either. A great name is sorta like an earworm that you can’t get out of your head.

Ultimately these are the two decision points that I would labor on the longest. Once you’ve figured out what you are going to write about and what you are going to call it, honestly a lot of the rest of the pieces fall into place. In the next few days I will be talking about more technical decisions that you will need to make, but for now this is a good starting point.