Save the Media

Your first step is to name your new blog. This can actually be tough for journalists, who are trained to come up with catchy headlines that have double meanings or use irony or nuance. That’s all part of the discipline. Problem is, those type of names don’t work great as blog names.

Here’s why. You want people who would be interested in your blog to find it. One of the best ways they can find your blog is through a Google search. But people don’t type in “Word to the Wise” when they are look for a blog about books; they type in books or reading. Likewise, they don’t search for police information by typing in “Cop Shop” or “The Fuzz.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t be clever. You just want to be clever with the right words.

How do you know what those words are? Think of your target audience; figure out what they might type into Google if they were looking for a blog like yours; the words you come up with are your “keywords.” It’s a good idea to use at least one of those words in your blog name.

Use of keywords in your blog name relates to search-engine optimization, which is just a fancy word for thinking like Google.  (I’ll get into SEO more in a later post because it’s a very important concept.)

Now, you may be thinking: “I know some great blogs that don’t follow this rule.” Of course, some bloggers are just amazing or lucky or so good that the name doesn’t matter. But if you’re working for a newspaper and your job is to make your blog popular, why hamper yourself? If you’re blogging for fun on your own and don’t care about traffic, then the name doesn’t matter at all.

I didn’t know any of this with my first blog, which I started 19 months ago. I named it Family Life because I wanted to be inclusive of moms and dads.  If I had it to do over again, I would have put Mom or Mommy in the name because my primary audience is moms, and I suspect they search using “mom” more often than “family.”  But now my blog is known by its name, so I wouldn’t change it.

I was thinking like a journalist, not like Google.

With this blog, I purposely put media and save in the title because those seem to be words that would come up in a search that might lead someone to my blog.  (I originally wanted savejournalism or savenewspapers, but they were taken.)

Once you have two or three potential blog names, plug them into Google and see what comes up. See if searching for your possible name yields sites similar to what you want yours to be. Also, make sure someone else doesn’t have a name that’s really similar. Once you start your blog, you want your blog name to be unique. Also, your blog name will become part of the URL of your blog. (How that works will depend on the blogging platform your newspaper uses.)

Settle on a title, and now you’ve made your first step to becoming a blogger.

In my next blog post, I’ll discuss how Widgetboxes and Technorati can be important tools for journalist bloggers.

– Gina

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