Are you a regular blogger or planning to become one and wondering how you can earn a good reputation and handsome money from your blog?
Do you know the best practices that must be followed by every blogger in order to make the blog a success?
If these questions revolve around your mind, then you must read this blog. It’s for you!
Blogging is not just a way to publish lots of textual/graphical information on the internet but it’s a passion. A passion for research, a passion to share, and a passion to communicate with your audience. Merely creating a blog will not lead you to any successful gateway but it is vital for any blogger to understand the audience’s behavior, their likes, and their expectations.
I have listed out some of the rules which I personally believe can help you to meet your objective of having a blog. So let’s discuss them one by one.
Value of Information
The visitors/audience of a blog always expect to receive valuable information from the blog posts that they read and if they don’t get the material up to their expected level, they would quit. Therefore, the most important objective of any blog post must be to provide valuable information to the visitors which is really helpful to them.
Imagine if you are searching for some information related to internet marketing for your business blog or you want some help on how you can increase the traffic on your blog and you land on a blog post that seems like ‘marketing help’ stuff for your blog but it just talks about the basics of a blog creation which you already know. What would you do? Yes, you got me right. Anybody would leave the blog immediately because the purpose of that blog post is not to provide value to its visitors. Rather the blogger had tried to grab the users who are hungry for some information without having the desired recipe prepared for them.
Blog Appearance
The more appealing a blog design and structure are, the more the chances that users will stay on your blog and would like to visit again as well. I know that I had mentioned in my first point that the most important element of a blog is the value of information or the content of a blog post but what if your blog has all the qualities of good story content and valued information however the design is still not appealing. The users may underestimate the value of your blog just because of the reason that it’s not designed well.
Here are a few tips on how you can make your blog attractive:
1) Have a unique design: You may install any of the free blog templates available out there but make sure that your blog doesn’t have the default design otherwise the visitors may have an impression about you that you are a newbie or a beginner in blogging.
2) Unique Logo: Using a unique logo differentiates you from the other bloggers. Not only this but having a logo also helps your blog to get recognition as a brand.
3) Remove Useless Widgets: Although there are lots of widgets available free of cost which you can install on your blog you must be choosy about them. You must use only those widgets which are useful for your blog/business. Using too many widgets can make your blog look messy.
Participation
Just having a nice blog with a nice design is not enough for you. You must also learn how you can participate in other blogs in order to increase your own blog’s credibility and popularity. It would be a nice idea to join other blogs in the same industry which will give you more exposure and traffic to your blog as well.
One of the best ways to participate is to read others’ blogs and post your comments there. You may also leave a link to your own blog while commenting, which will further increase traffic to your blog as well.
You may also link other bloggers’ stories on your blog and you will see them doing the same practice very soon. Your primary objective to host a blog should be not only to get readers to view your blog but you should also to share other bloggers’ stories with your visitors as well which you think are worth reading. As a provider of blog consulting services in Singapore, I advise my clients to participate in other blogs which are related to their businesses directly or indirectly.
Content Platter
Even after having all design elements and content in place, if the story is not served well in front of your visitors/readers, you will still lose your readership. When I say serving the content in a good manner, I mean making your blog post easily readable and scannable by your readers. I would again suggest a few points which can help you to present your blog post in an easily readable format.
1) Using bullet points: If your blog post is lengthy, you must use bullet points to distinguish the lines/sentences so that your key points are easily readable.
2) Use soothing colors: Sometimes despite having a sound blog story, visitors don’t read the complete blog due to the bad color combination of fonts which makes it very difficult for visitors to read them.
3) Using correct font size: While writing your blog post, you must also consider those readers also who are not able to read the small fonts or have a tendency to scan the whole blog before reading each line.
4) Paragraph indenting: A blog post without any paragraphs or fewer line breaks looks like a log of huge chunks so you must make sure to provide line breaks and paragraphs wherever necessary.
I will come up with some more important rules of blogging that can help you to write great blog posts.