Top 10 Things I’ve Learned About Blogging This Year

By: Dr. Matt Warnock

Dr. Matt Warnock playing at a recital in Brazil - Photo credit: Netun Lima

As Guitar International Magazine celebrates its first birthday, I thought I would take this time to look back at this first year and share 10 things that I’ve learned about blogging from my work with the magazine.

I began the year as a freelance writer, then moved up to contributing author, before being promoted to Associate Editor and finally Editor in Chief of the magazine. It’s been a whirlwind journey these past 12 months and during that time I’ve learned an incredible amount about blogging, the guitar business, running a website and everything in between.

Though I could have written a book about my experiences, both positive and negative, this year, I’ve narrowed it down to the Top 10 Things I’ve Learned About Blogging This Year.

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1. The level of an artist’s success is usually relative to how nice they are and how well they treat the press. A great example of this was my interview with Robby Krieger, who was one the most considerate and easy to get along with artists I’ve ever dealt with, not to mention one of the biggest names I’ve interviewed.
2. If you want people to write for you all you have to do is ask. I wasn’t sure people would want to contribute to an up and coming guitar blog, but once we put the word out the response was incredible. We’ve had numerous great guest posts this year including articles from Brad Conroy, Levi Clay, Lori Kay and many more.
3. Blog design and functionality is as important, if not more important, than the content on the site. We learned very early on this first year, and spent hundreds of hours fixing things up, that you can’t just post solid content and have people flock to your site. We needed to make the site look as attractive as our articles read. For this reason we’ve streamlined the site, kept ads to a minimum, and really focused on giving our readers an enjoyable experience while spending time on the site.
4. Social networks are the new Google. When we first launched the site we thought that getting our articles indexed on Google and other search engines would be good enough to build traffic and get people to the site. Boy were we wrong. It wasn’t until we launched our Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages that we really saw a rise in traffic to the site, which has been growing at 20% per month ever since!
5. Getting readers involved in the site is a great way to build a sense of community around GI. Since launching our Facebook and Twitter pages, and opening up comment s on the site, we’ve really enjoyed the increased level of interaction this has given us with our readers. Now people can comment on their favorite, or least favorite, articles, suggest artists for us to feature and share links to their favorite articles from across the web. This is also the reason that GI chose to launch our Monthly Newsletter in September of 2010.
6. Reaching out and promoting other guitar bloggers who we’re fans of is not only fun, but a great way to develop important relationships with other bloggers. It took us a while, forgive us we’re slow and stubborn sometimes, to realize that we can use our site to show some love to the other guitar blogs that we read on a daily basis. For this reason we’ve added a blog roll to the site’s sidebar, and have started showcasing our favorite articles of the week as well as launched our series “10 Great Guitar Blogs.” Both have been successful from a traffic standpoint, but also from a personal standpoint as it has allowed us to meet some very fun and cool people who share our love for writing about the guitar.
7. If you want to interview a big-name guitarist, most of the time all you have to do is ask. It’s always a little daunting to approach your favorite player and ask to do an interview with them, but I’ve learned that simply by asking most of the time people will say yes. Case in point being my interview with Silversun Pickups guitarist Brian Aubert, who I am a huge fan of and who I put off contacting for months since I figured he would say no. But, all I had to do was ask and he was all for it, turned out to be one of my favorite interviews of my career so far.
8. You can learn a lot about running a guitar blog from the best bloggers in the business who don’t run guitar blogs. Although I’ve learned a lot about running a blog from reading, studying and learning from other guitar bloggers, most of the time when a light bulb goes off above my head it’s because of an article I’ve read at either Copyblogger or Problogger. So if you’re looking for inspiration go to the best sources available, and these two sites are the online bible for running a blog or related website.
9. Running a website, even a small one like GI, is a ton of hard work that never seems to end but is incredibly addictive at the same time. During any given week I’ll put in 60+ hours into writing, editing and marketing the articles on the site, and right now I’m doing it pro-bono as a labor of love. BUT, while there are many jobs out there that I would hate to work this hard at, I just love working for GI. I find myself getting up at the crack of dawn to work on the site, not closing my laptop until way after midnight the next day. Writing about guitar for me is as addictive as performing, and so I’m grateful to have an outlet as cool and fun to write for as Guitar International.
10. The site would be nothing without our readers and supporters. We can write the coolest articles in the world, interview the biggest names in the business and design the most attractive site on the web, but it all means nothing if people don’t visit the site. Our readership has being growing at an incredible rate this year and the site has already grown to a level that I don’t think we expected it to reach this quickly.

For that, everyone at GI, including myself, would like to extend a huge THANK YOU, to all of our readers for making our first year such a success and for making it a joy to get up early every morning to work on the site.

We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our readers so for that, THANKS!!!!