Recently I interviewed a blogger who amassed more than 3,000 blog subscribers in less than 18 months.
I did a follow-up interview and asked him where he found all those people.
His answers can be found in my post How to Quickly Find 3,000 Blog Subscribers.
One of his answers was shocking.
According to Eric Schlehlein, one of the ways to find 3,000 blog subscribers is to network with poets.
This put me in predicament. I have always suggested bloggers network with like-minded individuals.
If I am a blogging strategist, I should offer easy-to-implement suggestions. For bloggers to network with poets, they would need to explain why they are networking with them, why they are like-minded individuals, and make an insightful comment on their post.
Fortunately, my guest author Timeyin is here to explain why poets and bloggers are like-minded writers.
How Bloggers Are Like Poets
Seven Secrets to Writing Good Poetry
Many aspiring poets really don’t know how to write poetry. This is because the poetry does not reach its targeted audience, or the poet is targeting the wrong audience, or the audience doesn’t like poetry in general.
In today’s modern world, poetry is the most undervalued genre of literature, which is not surprisingly as its superior style makes it have a lot of enemies and always has the potential to look boring. Poetry is more than that, and it is bettered only in terms of imagery and the message it passes across by a picture in contrast to a novel or drama.
Below are seven secrets tips which will not only help you reach out to any audience in the world but improve the overall quality of your poem without having to change your style or drop your favourite topic you love to write on.
- Tell a story
Every work of art should tell a story. We all know poetry is a genre of literature, and, in general, literature tells a story, so it is only logical for poetry to tell a story, and like other genres, it has to be a good captivating story to captivate a large web of readers.
The success of any piece of poetry according to the ManOnPurpose research group is 100% tied to the quality of the story it tells and not the quantity. This, according to further research by the group, is responsible for most failures in poetry.
If your story is poor, no matter how you play with words and do your pun homework, your poetry will be below average, but if you deploy a good storyline and simple diction, you will get the pass mark.
Admin blogger’s commentary: Self-hosted bloggers have access to the Flesch Reading Scale. Bloggers must have readable posts. Also, Timeyin mentions if a storyline is poor, your poetry will be below average. Similarly, bloggers should try to hit it out of the park every time. Our readers deserve that.
- Imagery
Imagery is as important to poetry as any other genre if not more important. Poetry is officially the world’s most under appreciated work of art and the most imaginative too (apart from fiction). While prose and poetry gives you the liberty of creating a clear and vivid picture for the reader and at the same time affording you the privilege of expressing your ideas in an unmeasurable number of words, poetry is the opposite.
Like a picture, poetry allows for deeper meanings and varying views, and, of course, limited words in a sense. This is where imagery comes in; the imagery should be so good the reader immediately gets the whole picture the poet is conveying to him.
Admin blogger’s commentary: Bloggers use graphics in their posts to draw the reader in and give them a visual image of what the text is conveying.
- Know your Audience.
A very important point–  you must take into consideration the audience you want to reach or else you will be throwing diamonds into an ocean, instead of selling it for profit. If the audience you intend to reach out to are average readers and not good appreciators of poetry, then it would do you a wealth of good to reduce the language difficulty and choose simplicity, or else your audience won’t read far into your poetry and likely not read another word of your poetry again.
A reader most times will likely not read a work that keeps him consulting his dictionary because he is confused. He prefers the easier way out, and that is reading works of art that contains words he can relate to, not some work that makes him look unintelligent.
If your readers are fans of poetry, don’t make that costly mistake of using words that don’t relate to the subject matter. They won’t be easily swayed by your rhymes if you are clearly making no sense.
Admin blogger’s commentary: Bloggers should know their audience. If you have subscribers of both genders, don’t write an article that would only appeal to women, for example, even if most bloggers are women.
- Unrelated items
Most poets tend to add a lot of unrelated items to make their piece longer, but unknowingly the message the poet intended to convey lacks some or all of its meaning and imagery. Remember, poetry is a story, and once it goes off that line, it becomes just mere words and ink. You can’t be talking about war and use peace and tranquillity terms to describe it, no war is peaceful. You can only be talking about relevant concepts.
Admin blogger’s commentary: Similarly, bloggers should write about one main idea in their post. You need to know what it is before you start. Tag your post that keyword and use it in your headline to make search engines easier to find your article. This will also make your post more understandable for your readers.
- Don’t sacrifice rhythm for rhymes.
A good poet, they say, knows how to blend similar words that rhyme into his poem to give it a structure and juicier flow without distorting the original meaning of such words. This takes time, sufficient knowledge of the topic, a thesaurus, and a good memory. It is not necessarily the rhyme that makes a poem juicy, it’s the flow of the rhythm. You can point to very good poems that lack some rhyme and very few that lack rhythm and make some sense. For your poem to be interesting and image evoking, it is not only the diction that makes it thick, rhythm is also important to enable the free flow of ideas for the reader. Rhyme is good poetry, but rhythm covers for it well.
Admin bloggers commentary: Bloggers’ writing should flow, have a voice. This is comparable to the cadence of rhyme.
- Take the blank verse/free verse bailout.
To put rhymes into poetry and not alter the meaning or find yourself changing some aspects of the message you intend to convey, takes hard work, luck, poise, and brilliance. At times, poets get hard luck which is kind of understandable. Of all the three genres of literature, poetry is the most difficult due to its emphasis on style and short words which tells a summary. A playwright and novelist spend a lot of time expressing their ideas into very big books while a poet would have to express this same ideas in at most four pages, and the imagery he creates should be a summary of the whole novel which is kind of hard. When you have problems with finding rhymes and use the free verse or the blank verse as a bailout, it doesn’t mean that you are less a poet than the guy who uses rhymes, it means you are smarter.
Admin bloggers’ commentary: Timeyin offers this “bailout” as a way to overcome writers’ block when they can’t find rhymes. Bloggers struggle with writers’ block all the time. Every writer does.
- Engage your readers.
This is the most important point of all. All of it (rhyme, rhythm, imagery, content) must have this critical ability to engage readers, make readers want to read it to the end. You can engage your readers simply by adding a bit of suspense, intrigue, and maximizing the tempo of the poem. Once you have engaged your reader, he or she not only reads the poem to the end but wants to read more of your work.
Admin blogger’s commentary: If you don’t engage your readers, you might as well keep a diary or a journal and not publish it online. If you want people to respond to your writing, you need to engage visitors. Articles explaining how to engage your visitors are listed under “Related Posts”.
Author: Timeyin Mammah, Blogger/Writer
Follow my blog: www.mammahtimeyinword.wordpress.com
Me again: We appreciate Timeyin’s article explaining how poems are like blogs. Show our guest some blog love, and go check out her blog.
Now that you know what bloggers and poets have in common, you might be wondering where to find the poets to network with. That’s easy. You could type poetry blogs into search engines and find them that way. Also, WordPress.com enables you to search for blogs by tags. Search the poetry tag.
In closing, do you want to know what’s great about Eric Schlehlein’s suggestion to network with bloggers? It’s actually a time-saving blogging tip! It doesn’t take long to read a poem in order to compose an insightful comment.
Do you know what? It’s why he suggested networking with poets in the first place!
Readers, please share, so others know the benefit of networking with poets and how poets and bloggers are like-minded writers.
What do you think? Do you think Eric’s suggestion to network with poets is a good one? Do you agree that blog writing is similar to poetry? I look forward to your views.
Related Posts:
How to Quickly Find 3,000 New Blog Followers
How to Quickly Get 3,000 New Blog Followers
How to Get New Blog Followers: Experts Reveal Their Secrets
How to Immediately Increase Your Blog Subscribers
How to Have a Successful Blog By Quickly Engaging Your Readers
How to Engage Your Blog Readers
