Blogging 101

I’ve stumbled upon a lot of blogs which I personally felt were missing something. As a blog visitor, there are a few things I’ve come to expect/enjoy on a blog, and I’m not the only one. So here are a few tips for improving your blog for the general reader, which I’ve learnt from reading other guides, building my own blog, and of course, being a reader myself.

Content

If you’re not sure what to write about, here are a few tips. Get into the habit of taking screenshots of anything that looks interesting, something you might potentially be able to use for a blog post, and take a fair few of them. You probably won’t use them all, but trust me, it will help when you’re looking for images or inspiration. At the end of an evening of playing WoW, look through your recent screenshots, think about what you did ingame, jot a few things down. Perhaps you saw something in general chat that you could share, or maybe you had a particularly nice pug group. Whatever it was, write down a few notes, and write about it if or when you are ready to. Read other blogs for inspiration, you never know what ideas might come to you from somebody else’s post. Any ideas at all, put them down as drafts. Even if you never use a lot of it, it will help you to come up with a few posts.

Writing – Keep your readers enthralled, write about things people will be interested in, whilst also being interested in writing them yourself. If your writing is forced, your readers can tell. Make sure you use good spelling, grammar and punctuation not only in your posts, but your pages and your titles. A spell checker can help you with this, to check over for typos, though you may like to have a friend check for errors also if need be. Also, use paragraphs! Wall of text is much easier to take in if broken up a bit.

Images – Another viable form of blogging, posting screenshots, photos, art, any kind of imagery, as long as it is interesting and relevant. Of course, images are also a nice aid to blog writing, in fact a post may be more enjoyable to read with images alongside the post.

Relevance – Try to keep what you post relevant to your theme. Your visitors will get used to a certain theme and look forward to reading what you have to say/show. If your theme is apples and one day you blog about pop music, it might put people off coming back.

Layout

RSS – You will want to add an RSS feed at the top, and sign up for feedburner on google! People like to find RSS feeds easily, and be able to sign up for your feed much easier. Trust me, not everybody who reads your blog will manually check it regularly, compared to those reading via a feed.

Search – Add a search form near the top too. Some people like to search for particular information, or even old posts, so include a search box, and make good use of post tags/categories.

Categories – Easy to navigate categories, try not to add too many, post things under the right categories, do not use ‘Uncategorised’. I personally like to use a dropdown in the sidebar, some people prefer a list, that’s personal preference.

Blogroll – You will want to add a blogroll and don’t overdo it. People won’t check every single link, so just a few will do, at least categorise them separately if you have a few. Also, keep it upto-date, remove dead/old blogs if they no longer have any relevance. Blogs which aren’t updated anymore but still include a good list of links, a well used forum, decent resources, i.e. Big Red Kitty, are still worth linking to. Generally though, it’s nice to see what people are reading.

Layout – Ensure you have an easy to navigate and look at layout. If your layout is messy, people won’t come back. Images and colours also attract people to read more.

About You – Have an about page, often people will want to know about you, your blog and perhaps other things related to your blog, character information if you’re a gamer, etc. You may find it weird, but people like to know more about the person whose opinions and thoughts they are reading about.

Contact – Sometimes people will want to contact you, either a page with your contact information, a contact form, or even some information in the sidebar will do, as long as there is something.

Comments – Every blogger loves to receive comments. Make sure it is easy for visitors to comment, and filter out the spam. WordPress users can use Akismet, some may have to do it manually.

Truncated Posts – Personally, if a blog uses truncated posts, unless something really grabs my attention from the word go I won’t bother reading past the first section. That’s to see if the rest of the article is worth reading. If the entire post is shown on the page, I will read it and perhaps then stick around a little bit longer. These are especially annoying in a reader, I won’t read the post in a reader if it’s truncated. Try to avoid it.

A Few Other Guides

• 12 Tips to Improve Blog Usability.
• 5 Things You SHOULDN’T Do When Approaching Bloggers.
• How to Build a Super Popular Warcraft Blog from Scratch.
• So, You Want to Blog?
• WordPress Self-Hosting: A Starting Guide