BLOGGING TIPS FROM BRATTON
Here are some good tips from Suz and from things I’ve found on line to help you have a blog that is important and drives traffic.
Why bother blogging if you’re not going to create notoriety you can monetize.
Remember, you’re doing this to aggregate audience that we can monetize to send you revenue. This is not just to make you famous!
Here are some of my personal tips then below some additional info:
• Use Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts to get news delivered via email on your key word triggers so you can blog about what’s going on in the world.
• Draw Fire – have an opinion and state it. Being controversial and unique creates a bigger audience.
• Comment on Others – link to other bloggers and sites and state your opinion about their content.
• Break it Down – post small blurbs more frequently than big blurbs less often. Bite sized chunks of your fabulousness are the best.
• Ask For Comments – ask questions of your readers so they comment.
• Cross promote your weekly audio show - blog about your podcast when ever possible. Take a little thing that you talked about in the podcast and expand on it. Get your guests to post comments.
• Cross promote other shows and blogs on the network - and they will promote you. Float that boat!
Ten Tips for Writing a Blog Post
The following post was submitted by Lyndon from Flockblog who in his email to me with it described it as a simple ‘back to basics’ kind of post. Thanks Lyndon.
Here are ten tips that help me with my blog writing.
1. Make your opinion known
2. Link like crazy
3. Write less
4. 250 Words is enough
5. Make Headlines snappy
6. Write with passion
7. Include Bullet point lists
8. Edit your post
9. Make your posts easy to scan
10. Be consistent with your style
11. Litter the post with keywords
1. Make your opinion known
People like blogs, they like blogs because they are written by people and not corporations. People want to know what people think, crazy as it sounds they want to know what you think. Tell them exactly what you think using the least amount of words possible.
2. Link like crazy.
Support your post with links to other web pages that are contextual to your post.
3. Write Less
Give the maximum amount of information with the least amount of words. Time is finite and people are infinitely busy. Blast your knowledge into the reader at the speed of sound.
4. 250 is enough
A long post is easier to forget and harder to get into. A short post is the opposite.
5. Make Headlines snappy
Contain your whole argument in your headline. Check out National newspapers to see how they do it.
6. Include bullet point lists
We all love lists, it structures the info in an easily digestible format.
7. Make your posts easy to scan
Every few paragraphs insert a sub heading. Make sentences and headlines short and to the point.
8. Be consistent with your style
People like to know what to expect, once you have settled on a style for your audience stick to it.
9. Litter the post with Keywords.
Think about what keywords people would use to search for your post and include them in the body text and headers. make sure the keyword placement is natural and does not seem out of place.
10. Edit your post
Good writing is in the editing. Before you hit the submit button, re-read your post and cut out the stuff that you don’t need.
Writing Quality Content:
Usefulness and Uniqueness - As this post is a part of a series of posts that get back to the basics of blogging and so I will start unpacking the topic of ‘writing good content’ with perhaps the most basic and obvious point of all:
‘for a blog to be successful your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers’
As I say - it’s not rocket science but it’s a factor that I think bloggers need to continually be asking themselves about as they review their blogging. Is your blog useful?
Back in the days when I studied marketing I remember sitting in lecture after lecture getting more and more frustrated as I heard my lecturers drum into us the same thing time after time. Although they said it in different ways, the lessons that they communicated was largely the same in every instance and boiled down to this:
‘Start with the customer - find out what they want and give it to them.’
This is a good lesson for bloggers also.
While I would also recommend that you start with yourself as a blogger and blog out of your own passions, experiences and knowledge - it is essential that you are aware of your reader and that you create content that will add something to their lives. Give them something useful.
What is ‘useful’ content?
Of course ‘useful content’ to me is different from what it is to you, but could be any of the following:
- Entertainment - increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
- Education - some blog readers are primarily interested in learning something about a given topic.
- Information - many successful blogs are built on the thirst that some have to be informed on an issue, product or topic
- Debate - some blog readers want a place that they can have a good old fashioned dialogue, debate or even a fight over an issue
- News - many blog readers just want to be kept up to date in a field
- Community - I’m aware of some very successful blogs that tap into the need that people have to connect and belong. Quite often the topic is secondary to these connections.
This list could of course be a lot longer (feel free to add to it in comments). Each blog has the potential to be ‘useful’ in a different way and it would probably be unwise to start a blog that tried to be all of these things at once (although many blogs do do a variety of these things at once).
Research your Readership
Perhaps the best advice that I could give on developing useful content is to research your readership (or potential readership). If you already have a blog do this by surveying your readers (either formally or informally) or by asking for feedback. I regularly seek out the opinion of my blog readers to find out what their needs and desires are in the topic I’m talking about. If you don’t have a blog already then you’ll need to work a little harder to research your potential readers. I tend to survey friends, look a lot at other people’s blogs on a topic (especially their comments section to see what types of questions people are asking) and particularly look hard in forums and discussion groups on topics where there is usually a lot of question asking going on. As you do this you’ll begin to put your finger on what people are wanting and what you might be able to provide to meet these needs.
Unique Content
Another factor to consider when thinking about ‘good content’ is whether it is ‘unique’.
With a blog being created every second and with blogs on virtually every topic you can think of, the challenge for bloggers is to build a blog that stands out from the crowd. I see blogs every day that provide ‘useful’ content that have no readers simply because people are finding that information in other places.
Distinguish yourself
My advice to new bloggers trying to break into a topic where others are already blogging is to take a surf through the other blogs and websites in your niche and do some analysis upon what sort of content that they are producing. In most niches you’ll find that sites are all presenting very similar information in pretty much the same voice, tone and style. As a new blogger on the topic you have a choice - you can either replicate what they are doing and try to do it better (difficult as they will already have loyal readers and unless you’re brilliant at it you’re unlikely to convert these readers over to you) OR you can distinguish yourself in someway from what others are doing.
This might mean tackling a slightly different topic (perhaps a sub-niche) but could also mean writing in a distinct voice (take a look at Manolo’s blog for an example of a blogger who has grown a cult audience by writing about an odd combination of topics as an anonymous blogger writing in the third person). It might also mean writing in a different genre of posts (ie if everyone else is writing ‘newsy’ posts you might like to write more ‘opinion’ type posts).
Bring together the elements of both Useful and Unique content and you will be one step closer to a successful blog.
Original Content - You will notice that I have chosen the world ‘unique’ instead of ‘original’ in this post. There is mixed opinion in blogging circles on whether original content is always best. Regular readers of this blog know that not all my posts here are completely ‘original’. There are some posts where I use short excerpts (quotes) from other blogs as part of my blog entries. For example in a earlier post in this series on ‘what is a blog‘ I used a number of quotes from other bloggers as part of the post. As a result that post might not be classified as ‘original’ as such - but it is somewhat ‘unique’ (and hopefully useful) as I put them together in a way that they had not been used before (side by side) and then added my own comments to them.
My main advice on ‘orginal’ content is that writing is generally best as it won’t be found anywhere else in that form - however clever and fair use of other people’s content (always giving credit for it and using it within a ‘fair use’ way - ie only using short quotes’) CAN be worth doing IF you use it in a way that is useful to your readers.
Darren Rowse :: 22 Comments :: Bookmark this at del.icio.us
Post Length - How Long Should a Blog Post Be?
We might as well continue exploring the topic of writing good content with a topic that has been debated by bloggers rather hotly over the years, the length of the optimum post. There are a number of ways of looking at it:
* Reader Attention Span - It is pretty well documented that the typical web reader has a short attention span when it comes to reading content online. My own little investigation into length of stay on blogs found that average blog readers stay 96 seconds per blog (I’ve seen other more scientific tests that show similar results). What ever the number - it’s generally not long. As a result many web-masters purposely keep their content length down to a level that is readable in short grabs.
* SEO - There is a fairly strong opinion among those considered experts in Search Engine Optimization that both extremely short and extremely long web pages are not ranked as highly as pages that are of a reasonable length. Of course no one really knows how many words are ideal - but the general opinion seems to be that a page of at least 250 words are probably a reasonable length. Similarly, many advise keeping pages under 1000 words.
* Quantity of Posts - One theory that goes around is that shorter posts allow you to write more posts and that more posts are better for generating readership with RSS and in Search Engines. While I don’t know their strategy personally, some believe this is what sites like Engadget and Gizmodo do with their high number of short posts which make up the majority of their content.
* Topic/Genre - The type of post that you’re writing will often determine it’s length. For example when writing a review of a product you’ll generally write a longer post than when you write a news related post where you link to something someone else has written.
* Comprehensive Coverage of the Topic - Ultimately this has to be the main criteria that bloggers go with. I can’t remember who advised this but at some point in the last year I read someone saying that you should write enough to comprehensively cover your topic and then stop. Long posts for the sake of them are not a wise move - but so are short ones that don’t cover the topic well.
In the end you need to find your own way on this. Here at ProBlogger I tend to mix it up a fair bit. I try to write at least one longer post per day that gives readers a bit of meat to chew on (whether it be a tips post, a review post, a rant etc) but I also throw in ‘newsy’ posts throughout the day.
How To Post and Image to Your Blog:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Images
Read this and call us if you get stuck. It’s NOT intuitive!
Good luck.
