O`Bannon's Leap

Starting a New Blog

October 2nd, 2007 | by Scott

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It has been a few days since my last entry. Since then I’ve spent what little work time I had available on the eCommerce site I mentioned, however last week my Grandmother passed away so obviously most of my time in the past week has been spent on family matters.

I did have a long conversation during this time with a close friend who is starting his first blog, and I think a bit of the information he picked my brain for would be of value to others. Basically, he’s never had a blog before and he’s worried that he’ll just be writing for himself. He asked what my best advice would be for helping to build a following of readers and here’s what I offered to him.

Always write in conversation mode. Don’t preach at people, and don’t become delusioned that you’re some sort of semi-reporter. You’re someone with your own personal thoughts and insights on the subject matter of your blog, so share them with readers as though you were just holding a conversation with them. People like that. They connect with it, and since blogs are a keystone in the Web 2.0 movement that is all about people connecting and interacting online–that’s the perfect way to approach your blog writing.

Remember that the search engines exist, but don’t give them any value in how your setup your blog or write your postings. Again I’ll mention that the web is becoming more and more “people driven” every day. One of the reasons that social networks and bookmarking sites have grown so rapidly is because people have finally come to realize that when you’re looking for something, the best person to ask is… a real person! Not Google, Yahoo or any other search engine that ranks the value of sites and information with scripts and numeric algorithms, but actual people who can tell you if the information on a web site is truly worth reading or not.

So, embrace those social networks and bookmarking sites. Use a plugin on your blog that allows readers to submit your postings to the various social networks/bookmarks, and remember that what you write and publish will be what real people use to gauge your value for others. If you try stuffing keywords into your posts to attract search engines, those people will know it and punish you hard for it.

As for some technical details of running a blog, I always recommend getting your own hosting,with your own domain name (many reputable hosts provide free domain registration with hosting accounts), and using WordPress as your blog software because it’s so easy to setup and run–plus has tons of great add-ons for doing just about anything you could want to with your blog. Many of which are perfect for engaging your visitors to interact, which will lead more of them to become return readers.

Pick a pleasing but not too glittery design/layout/style/theme for your blog. Make sure it uses valid XHTML markup and isn’t heavy on graphics. The more media you use, the longer it will take for your pages to load and the more visitors who will hit the “back” or “stop” buttons on their browsers without ever reading your posts. It is just common courtesy to remember that while graphics and other media are appealing, there are also still lots of people with dialup Internet connections, a growing number of people browsing online with hand-held devices and many people using older computers that are slow to render media files, so don’t turn them away by adding too much load to your pages.

And my last piece of advice, is that once you start a blog you need to keep in mind that what you’ve actually done is start a conversation with others, and it’s rude to leave in the middle of a conversation, so be sure to add something as regularly as you can to the blog. There are several blogs of people I really like and admire, however they tend to only post once or twice per month to them and so I’m constantly disappointed when I visit their blog to find a story I read 3 weeks ago is still the freshest thing up. More than once I’ve removed a blog like this from my reading list for that reason, so once you start posting to your blog try to keep posting as often as you can with something interesting to say.

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Also See:

• Blogging Is Socializing
• Build Your Ultimate Alliance - Hey, I Didn’t Get Here Alone
• What Do You Consider Fair Pay for Blogging?
• Be a Bum! And laugh all the way to the bank

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