Ingredients Of A Great Blog
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It took me many years of perusing blogs before I started to think that writing one would be a good idea.
For me the tipping point was when I could see that as a reader, reading a blog would be better than reading a book.
And that is only true when the blog has functionality that a book doesn’t.
For example: Good bloggers link to reference sources in each post. If they are writing about something they read about somewhere else, then they link to it.
This allows the reader to go read the source information if they choose - something that a book just can’t do.
Also, blogs encourage consumerism. A very important aspect that hasn’t really been discussed very much. Perhaps this is because the plugins to encourage consumerism are not well known or difficult to install. Personally I took several weeks (of admittedly half hearted attempts) to get my “Related Posts” functionality up and running.
But “Related Posts” is of critical importance to get readers of your blog to consume your content. It allows the one time reader to peruse multiple posts that you’ve written on topics that interest the reader - it’s like the ultimate content cross sell - constantly engaging the reader with this dialogue:
“If you found this interesting, you may find this other related thing interesting, or this one, or this one, or this one… ”
And… Once they’ve read the next one, they’ll probably read the one after that.
I also think having a “these are the best 5 posts of this blog as voted by its readers” plugin is paramount as well - however - I’ve not looked hard enough to find that one yet. So if you know where I can get it, please post a comment.
Ultimately the more socially judge-able you allow your blog to be, the higher your readership will become. Because it becomes a self fulfilling consumerism, and social proof system - assuming you’ve got an angle on a subject, or a writing style, people want to read.
If you don’t that’s ok too - I write blogs solely to sell stuff, and I don’t spend as much time on the content as I do getting them ranked. It’s just that those markets have short attention spans and high volume sales with lower price points.
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