Tips » Some thoughts on blogging.

Some thoughts on blogging.

Recently, I’ve been asked by a colleague how to blog. Not just how to blog though, but how to engage with an audience, build a following and create a flourishing community.

There is already an abundance of content online with regards to the above points, but it’s not always clear or quality content.

Over the next few weeks I will be tackling each point and hoping to assist you in creating a better all round blog.

First of all, here are some ideas on how to blog. You should also bear in mind that I have written these from the perspective of a writer who understands social media and blogging, as opposed to a social media list maker hence this is not in list form.

One of the most important things about writing is to be interesting, so why should that be any different from blogging? I’m not suggesting that you should aim to be the next Charlie Dickens, but a bit of character goes a very long way indeed.  If people are not captured within the first few lines what hope is there for them to read until the end?

Create an eye catching, relevant title. You have to lure in the reader and make sure your title is relevant to your post. While “Elephants raise boy in the Jungle” is a wonderfully grabbing title, it doesn’t work if your post is about School Councils. Remember, that if you have feeds going to your Twitter and Facebook the only thing people will see is the title of the post. Your blog should have a particular focus, one that people can relate to, make sure you are passionate about it too. It’s no good starting blogging about one thing, only to realise you are not interested in that field after a week.

Imagery is vital. A big striking image at the beginning of your post and more throughout can be extremely effective. There’s an old quote that states “an image speaks 1000 words” so don’t be shy to use them. 

In my opinion it’s those three things that matter the most and if you do them correctly there is no reason why people shouldn’t start reading your blog.

However if you use the Internet you must know what’s coming now. It’s not just about being a good writer and being able to use imagery in neat ways. No sir. The hard part starts when you want to attract people to your site, when you want to start getting a response from readers. Nowadays, this is a much easier task than it was two or three years ago. With the introduction of social media sites, communication is a far simpler task.

If you don’t already have a twitter account then the first thing that you need to do is create one and read our tips on getting started with Twitter. Twitter is an ideal place to promote your blog. It gives you quick access to scores of users who may be interested in what you are writing about. However, there are certain rules you need to follow when marketing your blog on Twitter. It is important that you don’t overload your followers with links to your blog, it’s good to work on an 80/20 strategy. 80% of your tweets should be interesting points, re-tweets and @messaging, with the other 20% links back to your site. If people see you as a link machine they will unfollow you and connecting becomes harder.

There are various third party sites that you can use alongside Twitter to monitor the effectiveness and to also boost it.

Bit.ly allows you to monitor how many clicks your links are receiving as well as what time they occurred and where they were occurring. Use their simple URL shortening tool to add a link and then keep track on their easy to use dashboard.

Twitterfeed automatically posts to Twitter and Facebook from your RSS feed. Sign in with your Twitter account and then place the feed where prompted. You can select to update your feed every hour, day or week. It runs alongside Bit.ly so will monitor the stats for you.

Twollo helps you to accumulate relevant followers on Twitter by using pre defined keywords that searches through what people are tweeting. Someone who blogs about London might add ‘Camden’ to their list. From here you can choose to follow between 1 and 50 people per day. It’s a good way to accumulate followers and if they like what you write about then they can choose to follow you back.

Using Twitter I was able to accumulate some users thoughts on their best blogging tips. I think that you will agree that the responses point to the fact that if you get things spot on and revolve your posts around decent quality content you are more than half way there to creating your blog:

@Netwench: my blogging tips: blog about what u know, distribute post via different social media & respond to commenters

@Sjorsuk: my top tip for blogging is to re-read your own post a few times before you post it (or even better: print, read, rewrite)

@simon_baptist: Blog about things that are important too you