This is a guest post by Jesse Langley for Aiuniv.edu.
Blogging is viewed as one of the simplest activities to do on the web. Anyone can blog. Blogs are free to make; there are plenty of free hosting sites where many bloggers go to start writing. Yes anyone can blog, however not everyone should.
There are many blogs out there that are just hard to read. The content, itself, isn’t physically appealing. The structure doesn’t conform to any known writing structure and often the spelling is atrocious. This isn’t typical of all blogs, but you have to wade through a lot of garbage before you find any gems.
If you want to avoid your blog becoming internet garbage, there are a couple of ways to improve it to make it more legitimate.
Work On Your Writing!
This sounds easy, but this should take the majority of your time. There are a lot of things to do to create a legitimate blog.
- Pick a topic. Most good blogs focus on one topic instead of branching out and writing a post about everything. For instance, education is a good blog topic. The field is changing. A lot of classes are utilizing online tools, including elementary schools. Not only that, but many bloggers have varied opinions about where education should go and how it should get there.
- Always, ALWAYS, reread for spelling and grammar errors. Many blogs don’t do this and the result is making them and their blogs look uneducated. A blogger needs to take responsibility for what they write and how they present it to their readership. If their sentences are jumbled and missing a couple of key words—verbs and nouns are two amazing examples.
- Think for a minute about the presentation of your work. Huge paragraphs intimidate the eyes. Whenever possible, keep your paragraphs small. It helps readers get comfortable with your work and often they will come back if you obey this one rule. However, keep in mind all three tips to improve your writing style.
Guest Blog
Guest Blogging is a great way to promote your blog and create legitimacy. As you guest post (if you do a good job of it) many of the readers from the other blog will visit your blog.
Try to guest post on blogs similar to your own topic. By doing this you are marketing yourself as an expert and this will add greatly to your legitimacy. If your blog is an education blog, guest post on an online degree blog or any other educational blog; not on a technology blog.
However, if you can incorporate your own topic into their topic, you maybe able keep the legitimacy of your blog intact.
Get Included On A Blogroll
As you continue your blogging career, you may want to create a blogroll. A blogroll is a list of blogs that relate to your own. You’ll want to contact the blog owners first to get their permission, but if you posted on their blog before, they will more than likely be willing to join your blogroll and add you to theirs.
This will be a powerful asset to your blog because if they are a well-established blog, adding you to their blogroll will help significantly.
Submitting Your Blog To A Directory
There are many directories out there for bloggers and they are split by topics. Just place your blog, whatever topic, into the right directory. Many users use these directories to find new blogs to read and inclusion in the directory will help a lot in enticing others to stop by and read.
Start A RSS Feed
This is incredibly important. Often readers will want to subscribe to your blog so they know when you update. With an RSS feed they will be able to keep track of your blog.
There are a lot of blogs out there but not all blogs are created equal. Many are thrown onto internet heap as garbage, but there are a lot in the pile that should be recognized. If you follow these tips, it will at least help you rise to the top of the pile.
Guest posting works wonders, that’s true. You can steal traffic, brand your blog and at the same time spread your expertise throughout the blogosphere thus making yourself and your blog famous.
Good tips.
Blogging is not for everybody. It’s sometimes disappointing to know that some are just doing it for money. I hope it serves more than that. Thanks for the tips.
These are the excellent tips for blogging. Usually I write a little bit longer sentence and therefore, I will keep these tips in minds next time when I write for my blog. Thanks
Hey Jesse,
Well written and to the point. Its so true that in order to start a blog we have to first of all improve our writing. I believe that even the best writer practiced a lot before publishing their first work. It takes time to write perfectly and ‘practice makes a man perfect’. Also, I’d never struggle to read a poorly written article, why waste time and strain the eyes consulting thesaurus when there are so many information available on the internet?
With the tons of blog being created each day, you have to stand out and be known or else your blogging just for your personal use. Blogs are made to be shared and it is just right to follow the tips above to make your blog appealing and not disgusting. I love your post! Thanks!
Reaching out to readers is not an easy task so when you got the shot make sure you did your best because they might not come back if you fail.
I have to agree Andrew. We are all readers after all. We know what’s good and what’s trash.
Nice post. I do agree that guest blogging do wonders for our blog in terms of traffic etc, but one thing you don’t mentioned is blog commenting. Being the first one to comment on a reputable can really bring us targeted traffic. We must consider that too.
Working on your writing is probably one of the best things a person could do to stand out from the rest. If there are hundreds of other blogs centered on the same topic as yours, having a unique voice is what will get you seen.
Very much agreed. It’s a shame most people don’t take this advice and just end up blending in with the rest of the niche rather than standing out from it.
One of the copy paste washed out niches where there are rare occurrences of uniqueness is “money making” orientated blogs.
This is a good piece of advice for many of the new and old bloggers … I think we need to, of and on, keep on reminding each other about those good manners and techniques. I have seen that people get carried away with the freedom and anonymity that they have while they are online. If a blogger just imagines that the people who get to see what she has just uploaded may come face to face and tell her how rubbish was her blog post she would be much more careful with her writing.
Blog directory submission and blog commenting can also do the wonders for you. You can also get included in tricky SEO and SMO activity to get huge traffic on your blog.
It seems like every single person online has a blog of some sort. I read a stat somewhere that said, as of early this year, there were over 150 million blogs. Now how many of those do you think will last?
150 million? Not sure how accurate that is, considering Blogspot has just over 1.2 billion blogs listed for their service (site:blogspot.com in a Google search).
I think you forget that you can use custom domain with blogspot platform. I hope now that adds up to your number 😉
True, I was only using .blogspot.com as a basic example to note the vast number of blogs already out there.
Nobody really knows how many blogs there are exactly, as there are always ones being started everyday and also failing everyday so the number greatly fluctuates. 🙂
I got that stat from Wikipedia, which cites BlogPulse (apparently owned by the Nielsen company) as the source…