How to Make a Great Blog

Blogging can become a way to spread your message about causes you care about, rant, or just share your thoughts. Here are a few suggestions for creating a blog that people will keep coming back to.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Internet
• Website Domain
• Time

1. You may want to practice with free blogging services but eventually you will want to purchase your own domain name. When picking a name make it something easy to remember that matches your theme.

2. Blog about something you are passionate or knowledgable about. If you want this to be a good blog you will need to think beyond yourself, and appeal to a broader audience. Visualize your audience or group demographic every time you write. How does this meet their needs, make them laugh, inform, or inspire them?

3. Make sure you don't monotize too fast. Sure everone wants to make money, advertize, yada, yada. Not so fast. Make sure people are visiting your blog first, then add your advertisements subtly and strategically. The average blog reader is a little more sophisticate that the average browers, or at least they like to think they are.

4. Use contests, comments, or a call to action to provide a sense of community, gain input, and most importantly get more viewers. You are hoping that other bloggers will find value in your site and link to yours.

5. The more links into your site you have the higher you rank in Google and Yahoo search engines, and the traffic to your site will snowball proportionally.

6. Use a free tool like the one at websitegrader.com to see what you can do to improve your site.

[katecrittendon]

on 4/9/2009 Great insights. Thank you.