Happy 2009 blog and Twitter peeps! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season with friends and family . . . and snow! We sure did. It snowed another two inches last night. Was gorgeous snow too.
On my holiday vacation, I inhaled a couple of blogging books and found some great stuff in them about keeping blog content fresh (I know, the dreaded “fresh” word; journalists, cover your eyes). Keeping the content fresh on a blog is akin to a fast foot race with a lot of talented competition, at least I think it is. However, some of the bloggers interviewed in Stephane Grenier’s book Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets to Creating a High-Profile, High-Traffic, and High-Profit Blog point out that the “point” of blogging is to share your unique perspective on the thing you know best. That way, it comes across as passion, and is exciting, and quite authentic.
How does one DO that exactly?
1. Figure out your readership. If you can track traffic and stats somehow, ignore for a minute the number of page views you have and find out where these people are coming from. Twitter? Google? Other blogs? Then you can surmise why they came to your blog (what kind of information were they seeking? were they curious about you?) and that leads to all kinds of conclusions. From those conclusions, you can create many content-rich posts that qualify as “fresh” and will satisfy the many visitors coming to check you out.
2. Think logically. If readers are interested in book reviews, why talk about your most recent purchases from Nordstrom? If they want reviews of Nordstrom shoes, don’t talk about your quest to find an out-of-print book on sociology online. See what I mean? But don’t be afraid to experiment. What about if that long-sought book talks about the social aspects of shopping or what makes people buy? Then it pertains and actually dovetails in quite nicely.
3. Be enigmatically YOU. Don’t be dull. A long clinical explanation instead of a quick, bare bones, to the point sentence will interest many more visitors to your blog and won’t put them in danger of needing more caffeine. If you can’t help writing long sentences full of clauses, with many, many superfluous adjectives, check out some blogs you admire. How does it read? I bet it reads much more quickly and with less words. Learn to edit. Don’t be afraid of of writing just how you talk. That works best, really.
I am reading the Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging and Robert Scoble’s Naked Conversations (blogging for business), and this same theme crosses over into all these books. I guess it’s the most important. So take some time, figure out what you have to say, and brainstorm ways to continue saying that in a fresh, passionate, and very opinionated way. That’s what people want to read.
Have a great Monday!
