After seeing for myself just how many positive effects participating in a group writing project can have for your blog, and having the idea of hosting one suggested to me by a few members, I am now considering hosting one here at Bloggst. A crucial element of any group writing project however, is that enough bloggers actually actively participate, because without enough active participants most of the positive effects are lost. With this post I am therefore conducting a small survey, just to see what the interest is like among the members and readers of Bloggst.
As most of you will know by now, Bloggst is all about the community, and what better way to help promote our members and visitors' blogs than to host a group writing project? I know many people are still not quite certain about how these things work, so I'll do my best to explain it.
For the project a certain "topic" is chosen. It can be vague like for instance "Make a list of five favourites", which more or less leaves everything up to the writers, and they can write a list of five favourite meals, blogs or anything else. The topic can also be more specific like "Write about the top five reasons you are blogging", which narrows it down quite a bit.
Once the topic is set, each participant will write a new post on their blog which relates to the topic of the group writing project. Somewhere in this post, the participant specifies that this post is an entry for the Bloggst group writing project, and links back to the post that has all the details about the project, so that bloggers who read the post can easily see what it is about, and join up themselves if they wish.
As soon as submissions start coming in, the host (in this case Bloggst) will list each and every one of the submissions on the site, making it easy for the participants to find the other entries, and read and comment on them. Normally, those who participate will also link back to at least a few, if not all of the other submissions, resulting in a lot of link love for all the participants. The most important part of group writing projects however is the networking, and that it helps everyone discover new, quality blogs.
Another aspect of the project that would be introduced here at Bloggst, is that we would be looking to determine a winner. For each batch of submissions that are posted, a poll will be included, where people can vote for their favourite submission. After the project is over, a final poll will be posted with all the most popular submissions listed, and the one with the most votes here will be the winner of the grand prize. What is the prize? Well that is yet to be determined.
If you want to know more about the positive effects of participating in group writing projects, read the article
Five Reasons to Participate in Group Writing Projects. Once you've made up your mind about it, vote in the poll above on whether or not you would be interested in participating with your blog in something like this here at Bloggst. If we get enough interest, it won't be long until we get this going.
