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How To Make Sure Your Blog Stays Great, Part II

How To Make Sure Your Blog Stays Great, Part II

Last week’s post in this two part series detailed the steps in order for your Blog to become a mediocre waste of web space and bandwidth. It’ll become a shell of it’s former self making readers disatisified and ultimately leading them to leave. I’m sure you wouldn’t to bring this upon yourself especially when it’s easily avoidable right?


Well, for some, the avoidable isn’t quite so avoidable. Just to recap last week’s post: there are some definite no-no’s you don’t want to do. If I just ended in a few sentences only giving bulleted points to prevent the problems mentioned last week without expanding on them that would be considered lazy writing. Your team of Bloggers could lack motivation , churning out garbage upsetting your audience. You could also have a wild time pinpointing how your readers feel about your work, always lost and trying to please them. In short, you can solve one problem but bring upon another.

Regurgitation
No matter what we do, we will all regurgitate in our Blogging in some form or another, and this is something we cannot control. What we can control is how much we regurgitate and how often we do so. The key factor is deciding what exactly you want to Blog about, such as, for example, opinion based posts can be formed while reporting on news. Opinion posts won’t be covered too much in this article as everyone has a different one, but reporting the news will be covered. I’ve faced this problem recently while at iPhone Matters (yes, a Blog dedicated to an unreleased device) where all we can really do is write about rumors that a few days from now may be called out as false, and won’t be confirmed by Apple themselves ’till June 29th. Great problem we got here.

No matter what, I’ll be repeating what another Blog wrote, but I do have the choice of boring readers or entertaining them. I’ll go with the latter for obvious reasons. Say I find a rumor about the second generation iPhone having GPS, well, I can just write a short little paragraph saying second generations iPhones are rumored to have GPS, or I can go above and beyond. In addition to reporting this rumor I should include what changes this will bring to the over all design such as battery life, integration with Applications and just how credible the rumor is.

I cannot stress how important it is that if you’re going to report on every little morsel of information related to a news item, then you must offer your or someone else’s opinion. Thousands if not millions of Blogs will report the same thing, all it takes is a bit of copy and pasting, change a few words then boom, you got a regurgitating post. People want variety, if you give the an in depth overview of the the news item (most importantly noting how the news item affects others) and offer your own take, this gives people an excuse to bookmark your Blog and puts some meat on your posts.

Payments
This is a tricky one for Bloggers who need to hire additional writers. You may be thinking your payment is fair but your Bloggers hate your cheapskate ways. How you should pay comes down to three factors. How much traffic you receive, what they will write about (long opinion posts or short news clips) and how big your staff will be. Different Blogs will have varying pricing structures and yours should include flexibility. If you’re just starting out it’d be easy to have everyone on a schedule then pay them per month. Eventually you should allow writers to make multiple posts and pay based on number of posts but still retain a schedule to be consistent content wise.

See Also
beauty niche

Readers
Retaining readers is essential to a Blog and community’s growth. There is a saying “you are what you eat”, and this can be applied to Blogging as “you are what you Blog”. That’s how you readers see you. If you only write about your boring school days and how much you hate them, what kind of presentation is that? You may be outgoing and cheerful once class lets out because you’re away from school but you’re still focusing on the negative and readers will be quick to relate you to being negative.

You want to introduce your personality through your writing. Let readers be attracted to you, and not try to attract readers. What you need to focus on is each individual, unless they visit a post’s comments, it’s a one on one conversation between you and a reader. Your writing should be formatted so it appears as a discussion always leaving a little bit off so your reader can continue the discussion. Make it personal and let your themes reflect your image.

Tanner Godarzi is a 14 year old Blogger that writes for Apple Matters, iPhone Matters and his own Blog Tech Blot.

View Comments (3)
  • Good stuff, Tanner. I’m still trying to figure out how to get more participation (via comments) on my blog. I’ve been pretty consistent about posting fresh content fairly often – and I make a concerted effort to not simply regurgitate content that’s already available on other sites. And I’ve also been making an effort to leave my posts a little more open-ended or inquisitive to prompt readers to post comments.

    But, thusfar, my efforts haven’t really resulted in much extra interaction. Perhaps most baffling is that posts I was sure would get people charged up or inspired to comment have not…

    Sigh.

    Maybe this could be a topic for a future article here on Blog Herald.

  • The idea of spewing out the same stuff does happen. I think it happens with everyone in life. We just have to put our own spin on it to create authenticity. That is why a personal voice is so important.

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