new writblr here, trying to get set up and was wondering what you'd recommend for someone joining the community? Particularly, how to set up ones blog and meet new people? thanks in advance, you're great.
Welcome to the Writeblr community anon! I’m so excited that you’re joining us. This community is amazing, and I can’t wait to check out your stuff!
I’m honestly honored that you’re asking me for my advice, so thank you so much! I’m not entirely sure that I’m the best person for this since I’m also relatively new, but my writeblr had a super rocky start, and hopefully I can help you avoid the mistakes I’ve made!
Please excuse the chatter and anecdotes, I got really excited. It’s also worth noting that I’m the type of person to try to cover literally any and all bases, so it’s a little excessive and probably has too much information — take my advice with a grain of salt and don’t feel like you have to follow it word for word!
First things first, identify your writeblr goals! What do you want to achieve with your blog? What do you want to be known for? What do you want to post? What’s your writeblr niche? Having a clear goal is really helpful for figuring out what content you want to post, finding tags and making friends.
And as for the writeblr niches, you might’ve noticed that a lot of the bigger writeblrs are known for something besides their WIPs. What do you have to offer the writeblr community? What contributions can you make? For example (not saying I’m a massive, popular writeblr by the way, because I’m not), I’ve gained a reputation for being a writeblr that focuses a lot on positivity — I post a lot of motivational things alongside my WIPs because I knew that I wanted to be super supportive of the community. This isn’t something you have to commit to, you can post other things besides that thing too. It’s just good to have an idea of what you want to do, and a niche to keep in the back of your mind.
Here’s some examples of writeblr niches. This list is super limited and there’s a lot more out there! These are just some ideas to get your started.
Writing advice — some writeblrs are really well-known for giving advice on writing. It might be about diversity and representation, structuring a plot, grammar, making realistic characters, help with research, etc. This niche usually has specializations about what kind of advice they give.
References — Some writeblrs reblog and post a lot of references, so they’re kind of a nice place to go to if you want to find a masterlist of resources, cool programs to use, historical references, etc.
Worldbuilding — Some writeblrs focus a lot on a specific aspect of the writing process, whether it be worldbuilding for a fantasy setting, helping others with the editing process, character creation, etc.
Prompts — Some writeblrs post really fun prompts alongside their other content so that others might get inspired!
Relatable — some writeblrs post a lot about #relatable content that every writer goes through and can identify with.
What if you’re not sure you have anything to offer? No problem, because you have a lot to offer anyway! Write about your writing journey: your successes, failures, struggles, ideas, OCs, headcanons… I know I just talked about finding your niche but don’t worry about it too much — you’ll find it eventually as you post on your blog! It’s just something to be aware of.
Next step is to set up your blog! For the love of all that is good, I would 100% advise you set up your blog as much as possible before you start networking and posting things. Don’t be like me: I wasn’t expecting to do anything with this writing sideblog and didn’t have anything set up. Now my writeblr is fairly sizable and I’m super behind — my main page doesn’t have any real links because I don’t have them done yet! It’s a huge disservice to my followers I feel and I’m scrambling to catch up.
Here are some basic things that I would recommend you set up ASAP:
Find a nice theme you like! Keep in mind that not only should it look aesthetically pleasing, it needs to suit your needs as a writeblr as well. I personally use @theme-hunter to search for themes.
A good navigation page. I would really advise you to set up your tag list before you even start posting, and to update it as frequently as you can because you might forget a tag or tag it wrong and the categorization system get messed up. Learn from my mistakes, back when I just started gaining followers, I had to go back and meticulously retag every post I’ve ever made, one by one. Set up a good system right off the bat, and it’ll be smooth-sailing from there. This page is really good for finding navigation pages.
A good WIP page. If you intend to post about your WIPs you should have a place where people can go to learn about them! Have a description of your plot, some summaries about your characters, the genre, etc. Have some links handy for when people are interested! Remind people that these pages exist!
An alternative or addition to WIP pages are Character Pages where writeblrs have some information about their characters! There are some really good character pages on @theme-hunter, but I would also recommend checking out @roleplay-theme-recs to find some as well.
Remember to be patient during this process! The amount of available themes can be overwhelming and frustrating until you find one that you like. If you’re not familiar with HTML, it can also be a struggle trying to figure out the coding, but in my experience a lot of theme makers do their best to simplify it for you. It might take a while (it’s taking me forever still so don’t feel bad) but you’ll finish setting up eventually!
Connecting with the community
So you’ve set up your blog and you know what you want to do with it. So now what? You have a spiffy looking writeblr with a bunch of cool content and no followers to appreciate them!
Write a writeblr introduction! I missed out on doing this because I never really meant for my writeblr to be a writeblr and by the time I gained followers it was too late. So learn from my mistake, make an introduction post! Talk a little bit about yourself, your interests, your writeblr, your WIPs, your OCs, etc. I would recommend tagging some writeblrs that maybe have inspired you to create a writeblr so that they can see it!
Here’s a life hack: try mentioning that you’ll follow the writeblrs that reblog your intro post. People will be more likely to reblog. That’s how I gained the initial wave of followers. It’s also a great way to find writeblrs to follow so, it’s a win-win.
Otherwise @writeblrs and @writeblrconnections are a really great place to start if you want to immerse yourself into the community.
Engage with the community! Do you have a writeblr that you admire? Try messaging them or sending them an ask! For the most part, people love it when they get messages like this and chances are they’ll be more than happy to chat or help you out. Reblog WIPs and stuff that you like, leave comments and feedback for people, send them asks, etc. We writeblrs are honestly a little starved for things like that, and the more you participate and engage, the more people will notice you and check you out.
Trust me, that’s how I got a good chunk of my followers. I always make a point to submit an ask when a writeblr asks for them, I leave comments on people’s content, I give feedback, I reblog posts and add my own words to them. I’ve met a lot of nice people by being brave and sending the first message. The best way by far to get noticed is to pop up in people’s notifications a lot.
Maybe there’s a mutual or a follower who always reblogs or likes your posts. Go ahead and message them! Go check out their blog!
Follow a bunch of other Writeblrs! See what they’re doing! Reblog their stuff!
It can be really scary sometimes, but put yourself out there! Talk to people! It’s really fun, and before you know it, you’ll find yourself with more followers than you expected.
Participate in tag games! Of course, this is all dependent on whether you want to participate in them or not and it’s perfectly fine if you don’t! If you don’t want to be @’d in tag games, feel free to ignore this. But for me personally, this has been a really good way to contact and talk to writeblrs that I wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to talk to. If you’re interested at all, go ahead and give this post a like,comment or a reblog! This is where I go to find people to tag in tag games, so if you want to play the game, I’ll include you!
Be mindful of your tags! On tumblr, only the first 5 tags on original posts will be used for search criteria, so use the biggest, most popular, most relevant tags first for maximum exposure. Anything after 5 are usually used for organizational purposes or comments. Additionally, I believe that tags on reblogged posts don’t show up on searches anyways, so I usually don’t bother adding popular tags on things I reblog.
Don’t be discouraged! It can take a really long time to gain followers. I was sitting at 4 followers for a really long time (two of them were porn bots). And even with hundreds of followers, it can be difficult to build up an audience for your writing. Sometimes it can be super disappointing to see your posts not get a single note, or see a really small follower count. Click here to see my advice on how to not obsess over followers. It might take a long time, but as long as you keep posting and engaging with the community, you will gain people who are interested in what you have to offer. Don’t give up, you’ve got this!
As a bit of self promotion… I do Writeblr Spotlights! The current edition is locked in and loaded, but keep an eye on my writeblr: I’ll open up spotlight requests again soon. You can send in a writeblr (yourself or someone else’s) to be in the spotlight, and recommended to all of my followers! This is my way of trying to support underappreciated writeblrs and give them the recognition they deserve. If you feel that you want a bit of promotion for your new writeblr, or someone else deserves some, feel free to submit a request to me when they open up :)
I’m so sorry for the massive post, but this is some of the advice I have to offer to a new writeblr. I hope this helped at least a little bit! Thank you so much for asking me, I had a lot of fun writing this up and again, I was super excited that you sent this to me!
Since you’re on anon, I don’t know who you are, but I would love to follow you and check out your content! If you’re shy, feel free to private message me, or submit another ask — I don’t have to answer it publicly.
Best of luck on your writeblr journey, I hope you find it as wonderful as I did!