Monday, August 6, 2012

What Everyone Should Know About Blogging

Those who know me long enough would know I used to blog daily about my life. But this time round, I've decided to create a new blog. Apart from fulfilling my unit requirements, I did this because I want to start writing posts which are more meaningful and informational, that can help many others, especially in the area of IT. Through this blog, I also hope to build a reputation in the blogosphere as an Enterprise 2.0 consultant.

Today, I've decided to dedicate this post to budding bloggers who are interested to build their web presence. So here's a few tips to help make your blog a success:

1. Know your stuff
This is especially important if you want to blog in any specific field. Make sure you know what you are writing because the last thing anyone would want to read is a blog post that is inaccurate and unreliable. If you are writing a food blog, your readers should be able to follow your recipe and make a decent tasting cake! Besides that, having the ability to talk about the latest topics and go into in-depth discussions would definitely prove your credibility an expert in the field.

2. Present your information well
Presentation and first impression counts. This is one of the best blogging strategies one can apply that has been proven to be true. With so many other blogs popping out in the Internet, readers would often spend the first few seconds scrolling around the website. And if they decide that your blog is messy, hard to read and accompanied by a bad design, they would not hestitate to click away from your blog. Adding hyperlinks, bullet points, or images should also be used at the right instance to help present your information.

3. Advertise your blog
To help boost readership, one can use various social media like Facebook and Twitter to advertise their blog. Posting on these social media sites whenever your blog has a new post would certainly help keep your readers up to date with you. This is also done by successful blogs such as The Food Blog and TMZ. Besides social media websites, bloggers can also post their blog links in blog aggregators such as Reddit and Innit to help get the word out better. In such websites, users can either vote your link up or down, depending on whether they liked your post. Either way, your link would be there for all to be seen which means more possibilities of readers turning up at your blog!

4. Learning from others
Last but not least, we can also learn from other blogs. It always helps to visit other websites to analyse what they did right and what could have been avoided. By doing this, we can avoid repeating their mistaked without going through their failures. Besides that, we can also learn what readers love about those blogs and apply those things to our blog too.

Here's a few successful blogs where you can learn from:

Engadget - Their posts always contain up-to-date technology news and covers many events
PerezHilton - He provides the latest celebrity gossips and never fails to tweet about them
Emerils.com - Blogs about food which has readers coming back at least once every week

Well that marks the end of this weeks post and I hope you learned something from this. Feel free to comment and let me know what you think. Also, don't forget to drop by again next week to read my next post. Bye! :)

8 comments:

  1. Definitely helps !! Totally agree with you about knowing your stuff , that applies regardless to any fields :)

    P/s Hey I read Perez Hilton's blog too ..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, that's really true. If you don't know your stuff nobody can trust you. Haha, I'm sure we all love celebrity gossips. :P

      Delete
  2. Great stuff zenghoong! I like your point 'learning from others'. As the old Romanian Proverb says "Only the foolish learn from experience — the wise learn from the experience of others." All the best!
    e2karen.wordpress.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nice work! Some good advice here and well written!! The links you have posted are good examples of how blogging really does mean business now. I'm sure Perez Hilton is doing pretty well for himself!! Best of luck :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Finally i found your blog and saw your post just few minutes ago. I quite agree what you mention in this blog content, and I believe both of us have the same idea behind on how to blog. anyway hope to see more post from you Ben... Good luck

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Rick, look forward to your future content :)

      Delete