Blogging #2

Blog 2: What makes an Interesting Blog

1. Write the blog you want to write

Let’s be honest. A lot of bloggers care about clicks, and hits, and all those other single syllabic words that in some way indicate that people are reading your blog. Only ten page views a day? Why that’s terrible!

Because of this, bloggers tend to write the blog they think other people want to read. Sure this sounds good in practice, but imagine yourself a year from now – will you still be able to write on that topic? Will you still be able to cover the same information from a different slant? Probably not. Not if you hate every single moment of your blogging experience.

If you like video games, and you read about them, think about them, play them, and go to sleep dreaming of them, that you’ll probably do alright writing about video games. If you’re obsessed with comics – same thing. Heck, maybe you love shoes. You could write for hours about pumps, and heals, and – I don’t even know what those are, so I’ll just stop there. But you do, and so you could write a shoe blog.

However, if you love shoes, you’ll probably want to stay away from video game reviews, even if you know that would get you more clicks than the variously numbered MJ stylies. You know?

It’s your personal style and flair that will bring people back day after day after day. And that’s what you want – Just like in Wayne’s World, first they tell two people, then they tell two people, and so on, and so on, and so on…

2. Community Building

Make sure you have comments enabled. People love to write on your blog. In some cases, this will just be so they can have a link to their site on yours. But in other cases, it’s because they really care about what you have to say. They will want to communicate back and forth.

Now what this also means is that you will have to reply to their comments. I know – I know – terrible, right? But still, if you want to get your voice out there you better be ready to communicate. This back and forth will allow you to become more than just a faceless name attached to posts. You will develop a personality, and people will be drawn to that.

Forums and message boards are a good way to start community building too.

3. Multimedia is Fantastic!

Honestly, would you rather see screens of text, or screens of text with pictures and videos built into it? Well, answer this – how daunting would your text books be without pictures? So throw them in! Also – try not to use a default template. It just looks lazy. It will turn people off.