5 Ways to Become a Better Blogger

By Jonathan Walker

It never hurts to go back over the basics of blogging, something all the more important today as bloggers abandon their sites in favor of Facebook. You can make your site stand out, providing a respite for web users who are weary of all the social media noise.

1. Customize

A blog should not just be a blank web page with your thoughts scribbled on it. No, a blog is how you express yourself. It is how you choose to show what is important to you to the whole world. When you design your blog, make sure you customize it to better represent who you are and what messages you want to get across. For example, if your blog is about living green in an eco unfriendly world, you may not want to have a plain black background template with boring fonts for your text. Make it yours! And make sure that your post-customization product is readable and fun to look at.

2. Post

It may seem like a given, but remembering to post articles is a big boost to your blog readership. Many bloggers start out on their first blog swearing that they will post every day. In a few months they have fallen rather short of that goal, disappointing readers and themselves. For your blog, be sure that you pick a blogging schedule that you know you can stick to. If you are busier than others, tell readers upfront that you will only post something once a week. That way readers won’t simply believe that you are lazy or don’t care about what you’re doing.

3. Comments

When your readers comment, I’m sure you read them. But even more important that checking on those comments that they post is communicating with them further. If a reader has taken the time to read a post and to comment on it, the least you as the blogger can do is to let them know that their comment is appreciated and that you encourage them to keep reading and interacting. This is important to the readers, and readers are important to the success of the blog.

4. Guest Posts and Themes

One good way to shake things up a bit if your blog is becoming stale is to get a guest blogger to post send you an article. A featured guest blogger of the month may be a fun way to get a fresh voice out to your readers. It may even excite them that they may be chosen as your guest blogger one month. Also, try having a theme to each week or month. This will give people something new to think about and will add structure and excitement to your articles and topics.

5. Interaction

Finally, be careful what you post about. Though readers generally love to hear about what is going on in the blogger’s life, it is always nice for them to be able to express how their lives and situations relate to yours. When you write a blog post, be sure that you make some part of the post interactive. Inspire thought; ask questions; maybe even play the devil’s advocate once in a while. This leaves readers with the sense that they are not only spectators, but that they are actually significant contributing members to the success of the blog.

Author Information

Jonathan Walker is a blogger and writer for Car Insurance Comparison. Over there he most recently wrote about New Jersey Car Insurance.

Should You Kill Off Your Blog?!

From time to time I read an article with a theme along these lines: Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites are taking over the internet making emailing and blogging a thing of the past.

Though such ideas are out there, I have yet to uncover hard data supporting these kinds of statements. But I can imagine that there may actually be something to this sort of thinking especially since Facebook now has more than 400 million registered users and my email inbox seems to be under control. Concerning the latter I can say that the number of messages I receive daily has finally plateaued, this coming after many years of relentless growth.

I’m registered with all of the major social networking sites as well as with a handful of relatively unknown sites too. But if you think that I’m going to become a Facebook Farmville devotee and give up my blogging, you’re cluck crazy!

So should you give up blogging? Well, if your blog isn’t much to speak of then go ahead.

For the majority of people who have been maintaining blogs for several years, giving up blogging now seems to make no sense. Especially if you have created a regular following and have steady traffic. Of course, should you decide to do something completely different with your life, then exiting blogging makes sense. But don’t leave your blog twisting in the wind if you think that Facebook should replace your time online.

Here are some reasons why I am not about to give up blogging any time soon:

I enjoy creating my own work. Blogging gives me a platform or bully pulpit to say what I think. Certainly you can do that on many social networking sites, but you are competing in a noisy marketplace of ideas. By maintaining this blog I can control it and give people the chance to respond and be heard.

I don’t want to lose money. This blog certainly is not a money maker but I do manage other blogs that are. Losing a couple daily Adsense clicks may not be much, but that tends to add up. Why should social networking sites get the benefit of that and more especially when I am providing to them unique and (hopefully) interesting content?

For posterity’s sake. I can’t imagine my blog writings being around long after I am gone, but if they are then I want to receive credit for what I wrote. Even for the short term I need to point my potential clients to my writings; without a blog as reference then I have one less resource to show.

I know some people are interpreting the writing on the wall to mean that blogging will eventually go the way of newspapers. Well, newspapers aren’t dead yet and just like print media I believe that blogging will transform to keep pace with “what’s new” while still allowing bloggers to have a voice on a platform they control.