How to Be a Good Blogger

Blogging: My first experience at blogging came with an invitation from editor David Vye to contribute a guest blog on the Microwave Journal website. It was like a jump into the deep end of the pool!

I had never blogged prior and certainly not imagined such a prominent place on the MWJ site, but knowing David for many years, if he was willing to ask me to try it, I was willing to give it a go.

Now that I am a self-anointed expert blogger after six months of contributions to Microwave Journal and a recently-launched blog on our own AWR website, I thought I would share some insights I’ve gained from my experience.

First, I think you must possess at least three traits in order to be a good blogger:

1) You need to be outspoken (geesh, I guess I am not afraid to have an opinion or share my thoughts/views/perspectives on things).

2) You need to be entertaining (a VC friend told me he likes that I do not take myself too seriously on these things—that has never been me and so my own personality worked well here—I am a bit goofy on occasion or so I am told ).

3) Be relevant. This was the hardest one. Week in and week out how do you try to convey something that will be relevant and interesting to hopefully more than a handful of readers? Pulling from friends, colleagues and life experiences was key. I like to have a lot going on in my life and this has helped me to find inspiration on more than one occasion.

In the end, I started to blog about technology life, or rather, living in the career world of technology, if I have to give it a catch all. I was surprised by the response. The first month on the MWJ site, my blog was the most read. The trend continued as I continued blogging. People would comment, e-mail me, stop by at an event to say hello. What a great feeling! To find out that you have connected with people in the same career field as yourself and that you are able to meet new people and make new connections as a result. I was also amazed to realize that I was not only presenting myself in a multi-dimensional way, but that I was conveying a personality for AWR, too.

Blogging has turned out to be both fun and functional. So much so that I have taken the blog to AWR and have gotten others to join in and blog along side me. For those of you like me who have uncovered that work life is not a separate life of its own, but rather a life that blends, merges with our own personal lives, social lives, etc., blogging was one of the first ways (and albeit interesting too) to convey this complexity and connectivity.

All of you out there who are nodding their heads as they read this, start blogging…you’ll find it rewarding on many levels!

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