Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Secrets to a Great Blog and Why?

  • Pick a good topic that you can be passionate about: You do not necessarily have to know everything about your subject, in fact it may be more beneficial if you don’t. This way your judgments do not get in your way of evaluating new information.
  • Take slow: do one day at a time or else you'll run out of steam or become overwhelmed.
  • Be playful and expansive with blog content, voice, visuals and formatting: Along with experiments, writing styles vary from person to person, but that should not limit people from trying different styles. If it is a person’s first blog this is even more important. Because one blog which talks about cooking is set-up one way, while others just as successful are different. If every author wrote the same, about the same topic people would read books less then they already do.
  • Be open to new ideas: should be readily available to your audience members. People will appreciate if they comment on you page for you to write them back or possibly take their suggestion.
  • Example, In the case of my blog I received several comments which helped me with my formatting after my initial posting. First comment was on how to better embed my links. The other was on my bio.That little checkup factor helped me learn how to better my own writing techniques. I also trusted the people who commented (The Dillonator) (The Columbia Conversation)and I linked to their blogs. In turn those small changes helped me become a cleaner writer\blogger.

  • Niche audience: a key element to blogging is figuring out your niche audience and appealing to them. The appeal can come be varied. A person does not have to be the best writer to blog but they should appear to always be professional and personable. A niche audience takes awhile to discover. This is done through appropriate language, presentation and clarity within the actual writing. I changed my audience several times because you never know how people will take the information you put out. You have to be willing to change and be versatile to their suggestions.

  • Care: simply caring about your subject and the time you are putting in to the process, makes all the difference. If you care about your topic and want to find new sources and build more insightful multimedia packages\visuals, then people will get excited too. Like starting a fire, the idea is only the spark, it is the atmosphere which is created, that sustains the blaze while the amount of wood and pine cones you put on the fire acts as the writing, pictures, etc .

  • Posting regularly will give your readers a routine to follow as well.

  • Think of blog like a package deal: multimedia packages could be presented through, linking. A link should be embedded into a blog post at least once if not more times within one segment. It enriches your content. When you link, picking the appropriate words within a post help steer readers and inform them as to what they will be looking at. This also gives create to the sources you use, it is like writing a bibliography within a post. It may also give you more readers from their site or blog, if you link back. Just remember be aware of overlinking and it ends up looking more like an aggregater then a blog. The more varied the media used, like photos, visuals, websites or videos the better the blog appears.

  • Little tidbits which should be included in your blog: mainly basics of the internet. By linking to other blogs and creating a varied blogroll on your site you create more traffic and therefore become more reputable. Use sites like YouTube to embed video clips for example. RSS feeds and comments help in people’s perception of your content. Try new applications even. Being up-to-date with current and future trends could help your blog as well. Be able to spot other good blogs and offer them to your readers. Understand how to use social networking sites to your advantage which will build a stronger presence on the web.

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