The Digital Scholar

1. . . . you want to share your knowledge with the world. I just checked the statistics for my Early American Crime website. At least one person from 43 out of the 50 states in the U.S. has visited my website, and I regularly get visitors from all over the world. I have even gained the following of an early American crime fan in Sweden.
2. . . . you have an old manuscript or a bunch of research notes lying around, but don’t know what to do with them. A blog gives this hidden information a chance to see the light of day, and who knows, it all may become a book or scholarly journal article one day.
3. . . . you want to connect with other scholars and people who share similar scholarly interests. I regularly receive e-mail from people who have questions and want to share ideas about crime in early America. Some of the people who have contacted me are academics, and some are simply people who have an interest in what I write about.
4. . . . you want to add the role of “public intellectual” to your professional standing. Academics often bemoan the fact that they don’t get to interact with people outside of academia very much and worry that their profession is becoming too insular. A blog can give you a forum to reach out to lots of people and explain what you do and why it is important. Your blog’s statistics will tell you how successful you have been at reaching that wider audience.
5. . . . you have an interest that lies outside of your normal scholarly research activity and you want to explore it in a serious way. A blog gives you the freedom to explore topics and subjects that you might not ordinarily tackle because they are outside of your area of expertise. Over time, these topics may become areas of expertise, and you’ll already be recognized as an expert when that happens.
6. . . . your approach to writing lacks structure and regularity. A blog forces you to write relatively short articles on a regular basis. The time element that attaches itself to every post serves as a reminder of the last time you produced some writing. If you keep producing for your blog, before you know it you will have generated enough material to put together into a journal article or a book.
7. . . . you want to see published results faster than what a book or journal publisher can offer. Publishing on a blog is almost instantaneous. If you love the satisfaction of seeing your writing “in print,” a blog gives you that feeling every time you hit the “Publish” button.
8. . . . you need motivation to sit and write. A blog offers all kinds of opportunities for motivation, and what writer doesn’t need motivation? By writing a blog, you can take satisfaction that your writing will actually matter to someone out there. You will receive e-mail from people who respect and appreciate what you do. You will be contacted by people offering you other writing opportunities. You may even make a little bit of money from your blog if you decide to run ads or publicize books on it. All of these things can help you find reason to sit down and write.
9. . . . you need more than motivation; you need some kind of “outside force” to make you sit and write. When you first start a blog, the statistics can be pretty dismal, but as you keep writing, they start to pick up. Watching your statistics slope upwards can become an addiction, and the way to feed this addiction is to keep writing, because the more you write, the better your statistics.
10. . . . you want to give publishers a reason to publish your book. Not only does a blog help you generate content for your next book, it can serve as a means for publicizing your next book, and publishers are well aware of the latter. Your book idea becomes much more attractive to a publisher if you can prove that you have a built-in following for the topic on a blog, because the readers of your website can turn into potential customers of your book.

For tips and links to resources that can help you get a blog up and running, visit the Digital Scholar Toolkit.

Comment Question:

If you have a blog, what are some of the reasons you would use to convince someone else to start one?

Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Writing

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.