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Content Is King
Content is what makes a blog a blog. But what differentiates a good blog that is noticed, referenced, and bookmarked from a bad blog that is just another dead end in the Internet universe? Simply, the quality of that content. Great content cuts through clutter, engages readers, and provides value; unremarkable content recedes into the din of the blogosphere. Readers have seen enough bad content that they can identify it right away, so if your content isn’t uniformly interesting, no reader will give you a second chance to reinvent the wheel, per se.
While it’s true that content is king and substance is essential, a successful blog is visually appealing as well. That doesn’t mean it’s overly colorful or ornate; the key is that it is designed well for quality of experience. It should be clean, clear, and easy to navigate. How the content is presented is almost as important as the content itself because no reader will attempt to wade through a confusing and complex-looking blog for whatever nuggets may exist in the content. To ensure that your blog is well-designed, keep these important tips in mind: Create design standards. Your blog can look distinctive from the rest of your website but it must support your corporate design standards in terms of color and font choices. Make sure that the newest content is highlighted and past blog posts are easy to find and click to. Most big blogs use a standard template for all data and charts to make sure there is a consistent look and feel to all of their posts.
Structure Your Posts
While our blog authors have free reign over their content, we try to make sure each post adheres to a few simple structural guidelines, such as having a catchy title, useful content, relevant image, and supporting data. As far as length goes, we don’t have a minimum or maximum word count but they should only be as long as they need to be. Our most popular blog postings have been about 250 words.
Incorporate Media
Video, animations, images (either photographs or illustrations), tweets, and links to other sources of content and media add texture, information, and visual appeal. Assign roles. Who writes, who posts, who proofreads, who collects comments and manages responses are important decisions you have to make. Note that the person writing a post doesn’t necessarily have to be the same person who actually posts it to the blog. If it doesn’t cause unnecessary bottlenecks, you might want to have an official poster who collects people’s contributions, checks them for accuracy and adherence to standards, and then posts them to the blog.
Follow SEO Principles
Adhering to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) principles won’t make the content of your blog better, but it will make it more visible in search listings. You don’t need to spend too much time focusing on obtaining technical SEO skills. Just master the basics and spend the rest of your time generating great content.
About Author
Greg Henderson, an astute web marketing genius with plenty of self-help articles to his name, provides you with plenty of insight through his readings. Current projects include a reverse phone lookup service Free Phone Tracer along with an email search site with a groovy graphic, My Free Email Search.
