I just finished watching the movie Julie and Julia as recommended by Juned in a previous post here in XFEP. Indeed it was a very inspiring movie – for writers and bloggers. Julie Powell may not be the best blogger in the world, but she definitely excels in one important thing that all of us bloggers should learn to do (if you’re not yet doing it) – talk to our audience when we write blog posts.
Taking the other important things that we can all learn from Julie Powell, here are five blogging lessons that we can learn from Julie Powell from the movie Julie and Julia.
Be Passionate About What You Are Writing
Julie adores and loves Julia Child. She was her hero, icon, semi-god. And like Julia, Julie loves cooking. At some point in the movie, when Julie was talking about blogging she asked her husband what she should write about. Somewhere in their discussion – the niche came out – Julie will cook all the recipes in Julia Powell’s cookbook and blog about it. So she did.
Involve Your Partner
If you are serious about getting into blogging, starting a blogging career or at least wants to start blogging and you are married – make sure to involve your partner. Good if they know what a blog is. If they don’t explain it to them. Evangelize about blogging. That way, they wouldn’t be indifferent with you when you are blogging. Blogging takes time, time away from your partner. So, it is a must that your partner understands what you are doing.
Post Consistently
Julie Powell wrote a blog post for 365 days. She never missed a blog post every single day. Well, that’s easy for her because she is blogging about her daily cooking. If you are not blogging about food and something else, make sure you plan ahead and try to come up with a blogging schedule for one week. That way, if you encounter a writer’s block – you’d have something to post for the day.
Don’t Get Too Personal with Your Post
There are two sides to this advice. One is that if you’re not maintaining a personal blog, don’t write about something too personal about your life. You can give anecdotes and cite personal experience but not to the extent that you’d divulge everything about you. Julie’s husband warned her about this when they had a fight and he left her temporarily. Luckily she did not write about it. The other side is having to do with getting too personal with blogging. Don’t make it the center of your life. Do other things. Divert from blogging once in awhile – to avoid blogging meltdowns or frustrations.
Don’t Even Think that Nobody Reads your Blog
Julie thought about that. But she was wrong. At first there was nobody reading her posts except her mom. But soon after several days of blogging, readers starting to comment. And later on, a New York Times reporter interviewed her and wrote an article about her. Before she knew it, she was an instant celebrity about to become a full-pledge writer. Lesson here – don’t be discouraged by the thought that nobody is reading your blog. The fact that it is online and out there in the internet, for sure one soul has read even just one of your post. And that’s enough to encourage you to continue blogging.
There you go, five blogging lessons that we can all learn from Julie Power of Julie and Julia. If you have the time, watch the movie. It is one movie that all of us in the blogging industry can easily relate to.
Originally posted on November 9, 2010 @ 7:00 am