With blogs springing up all over the place at an alarming rate, they’re oversaturating an already sodden crowd and making it increasingly difficult to get individual blogs noticed.
Here’s a few hints and tips to get your blog beacon beeping amid the swarming sea of millions.
Format
The way your blog looks can encourage readers to carry on reading. Common wisdom dictates that short sentences, paragraphs, images, video, sub-headers and bullet lists punctuate your text, breaking up the monotony of reading huge, plain-looking tracts of content. That’s common wisdom for you. Personally, I feel content is king, and if your writing is good enough, the reading takes care of itself. But it never hurts to give yourself every advantage by making your blog easier on the eye.
Design
Having an unusual, eye-catching layout for your blog can be a catalyst for a visitor to start reading. Developing ideas such as signature logos or a custom header can go a long way to grabbing a browsing potential subscriber’s attention. There are resources for this all over the internet, many of them free.
Topic
Pick a unique topic for your blog. This might be easier said than done, given the smorgasbord of blogs out there. However, if you focus on trend topics like music, TV, fashion, technology and movies; subjects that are constantly evolving, you’ll never be short of something to write about and unique ideas are continually being generated.
Develop Your Voice
The style of your delivery is a large part of attracting a readership. You need to decide early on how you want to write so you can be consistent for your subscribers. Are you going to funny? Can you be funny, and I don’t mean just making your mother laugh. Are you going to write as you, or as a character or exaggeration of yourself? Are you going to rant about things that annoy you? Mostly, it will take time to develop your “voice”. It’s often said about authors that it takes a million words before one takes. Unfortunately, you don’t have that kind of time, so you need to decide, early on, which direction you want to go. Often it’s best just to write as yourself. This makes it easier for you to be both prolific and consistent.
Get Personal
People can read the news anywhere. If all you’re doing is reporting some happenstance on your blog, you’re not going to get much action. Treat your blog as your own private newspaper column, and offer an opinion about what you’re talking about. It personalizes the reading experience and connects on a more visceral level with the reader. This is a good thing. Opinions jumpstart discussions, and if you offer lively debate in the comments section of your blog, word will get around. Every reader has their own network they can introduce to your blog if the content and debate is compelling enough.
Controversial Titles
Once a reader starts reading, the title is pretty much forgotten. So don’t be afraid of writing a challenging, controversial title to hook the reader into ploughing forward. Newspapers have been doing this for centuries for a reason. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate for effect.
Be Prolific
Winning new readers is only half the battle; maintaining the ones you’ve already got is the other. The secret to this is to post fresh content regularly, and maintaining the standard of writing and quality of topics you’ve already established. In addition, being active in the online community of whichever niche your blog inhabits will generate interest. For example, leave comments on other blogs in the same field, and post regularly on discussion forums.
Periodic Reviews
New visitors to your blog may be completely unaware of your archives, and therefore some of your best blogs. You have to get them to pay the backlog a visit. Regular review pieces such as “Best Blogs of 2009” or ‘December’s Most Popular Blog” can generate traffic to your best stuff and encourage them to stick around for upcoming content.
There’s no magic formula for getting your blog noticed. Quality writing will only get you so far. Separating from the crowd is a result of tactics like the above; people can’t appreciate what you’ve written unless it’s sitting in front of them. Tips like these dramatically increase the chances of this occurring.
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My name is Ciprian Ginghina and I’m a full time web developer with more then 5 years experience under LAMP platform, JQuery framework and other goodies like that. I'm also involved in online marketing field.
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