How to maintain a blog or How I learned to make myself interesting
I have had this blog for three months now and the time has passed fast. I have tried to keep it up and to keep it interesting. I know that I have failed from time to time with both of them but it has given me further knowledge. I haven't quite yet figured out my theme, I guees I don't really find my life interesting enough to actually write about or I just find it to personal to be posted online. I do however like to post my thoughts and opinions online and i believe that the more people discuss their thoughts and opinions, the better. This is a way for me to leave my thoughts and opinions out there for anyone to discuss.
It might sounds sleezy but I do like blogging and I hope that I will create and maintain many more blogs in the future. This is an article I made in magazine article writing class as a result of my blogging.
Mimmi Törnberg
Blogging is a phenomenon that started in the 90’s and is defined as “a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order”, according to MediaShift. The credit for starting the blog is given to Jorn Barger, who coined the expression weblog in 1997. In the beginning, blogging was to post links to other content on the web, a way of sorting the mess out. Today, blogging is more like a forum to post your personal thoughts, opinions or life. But, even though anyone can do it, a blog without readers is useless online. If you don’t want to have readers to your blog, there is no reason to make it public online. So, to start a blog is easy. You just go and sign up for an account at a blog server or maybe you create your own page and put it up on a server by yourself. Blogger.com and Blog.com is two of the most popular blogging platforms. Any way you do it, creating a blog is easy, but how do you maintain it?
If you want to keep you blog up and running for a while, there are three important items to pay attention on, Content, Updating and Images. Your readers should come for the content, return for the updates and stay for the pictures.
- ContentWithout useful content there’s no use of reading the blog in the first place. Pick a theme and stick to it. Even though the theme limits your blog’s existence, it is better to shut the blog down and start another one than to have one blog with a thousand themes. And don’t fool yourself with thinking that categories will solve this issue. Having one blog with a thousand different themes in different categories is not a good idea. The blog in itself should tell the reader what the theme is. If it is a personal blog about you and your life, you should have personal pictures and a description of you on the page, if your blog is about you making comments about the news, there should be pictures relating to that and a description of why you are interested in the news. There’s no such thing as bad content, the question is how you present it. If you stick to your theme you will get readers that are interested in that theme and they will return for updates.
- UpdatingA blog is an internet thing. A media in the internet medium and therefore it is fast. There’s no use of having a blog if you do not intend to update it. But, it is better to be consistent rather than effective. Update your blog at certain times or days rather than a hundred times one day and not at all for weeks. Your readers want to recognize themselves so they need consistency. Every writer has a writer’s block from time to time; there is no escape from that. But there are ways of getting around that because writer’s block is not an option if you want to maintain your blog in the best possible way. Make sure that you write entries that you don’t post so that when the writer’s block appear, you have something to post. If you manage to follow the updating, your readers are going to return to you because they know that there will be something new there for them.
- ImagesThe visual aspect is important. The main thing is the content and if that is not good, it doesn’t matter how many pictures you have or how good they are, the blog will be bad. But with good content, pictures are going to make it even better. When you first start a blog you pick a design for it. Make sure the design fits the content and stands out so it doesn’t look like any other blog that is out there. But don’t forget about the visual after that. Your readers are going to return to you blog over and over again so they are going to be used to seeing your design. Therefore it is important that you post pictures and graphic elements in your entries. Make sure to choose images that go with your content. And make sure that you don’t overdo it. One picture to every entry is going to make it stiff and predicable so that defeats the reason for having a picture in the first place. Pictures and graphic elements are only ways of getting your blog to stand out from the other blogs that are equally good at updating and have the same theme.
Then there is one more thing;, a thing that have nothing to do with the actual blog but if you don’t do it, your blog will not have any readers or they will come very slowly. That is marketing your blog. Make sure that your friends and family look at it every day, so it will appear in search tools. Make sure to always link to your blog, whenever you are anywhere on the web.
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