Saturday, January 3, 2009

Maintining A Successful Blog: Information And Appearance

By Don Bethune

The information you offer and the appearance of your blog are what is most important to your reader. The personal blog can be a profitable personal venture which you engage in from the comfort of home. Maybe you have an expertise in an area like politics or popular happenings? The viewers of your blog expect you to describe current events as they are happening so that they may enter into a discourse about them. During the heavy political season this October, blogs were often the first to offer news to their readers (even before major news outlets). Viewers of your site rely on your writings to give them your unique perspective on current events, as well as to be the first voice to sound off on an issue.

Timely, relevant summaries should make up the majority of your content. Style separates you from blogs following similar issues. Ideally, you want readers to follow posts through affiliate marketing programs, rss feeds or portable devices. Short updates at regular intervals build confidence in your ability to keep readers informed.

For example, in the midst of Hurrican season, meteorological blogs offer consolidate information from a number of places, into a single comprehensive location. These meteorological blogs update more frequently than popular news media, and in some cases update data immediately. The information coming in needs to be restated in a manor that is concise and makes sense to the reader. This information can be found easily on a number of websites which keep a live feed of this kind of information constantly updating for you to interpret and post for your readers.

Often times these weather websites link to a number of blogs which are specialized based on the writers are of expertise. These can range from topics of natural disasters to simple storm tracking or daily weather predictions. Again, this information is presented as soon as is possible for you to post it. People wish to know immediately of changes in weather within their area. Particularly during events like Hurricanes, you readers may live outside the area, but still wish to stay up to date on information as it happens.

During periods of increased activity, weather blogs update hourly in order to address reader feedback. Hurricane Gustav resulted in tens of thousands of reader posts on a variety of tropical weather blogs and news sites. Curiosity is a powerful motivator. Blogs about extreme weather phenomena draws readers from outside affected areas and outside the country they occur in.

Tech Blogs update as news breaks from other sources. Financial blogs that follow market activity update during the day. Facebook blogs update as events occur in an individualas life, or when the blogger requests reader feedback on questions they are curious about.

The information you offer and the way in which you offer it are the things that keep your readers coming back to your site. Links to your affiliates within your blog may be profitable. However, these have the potential of also becoming distracting if irregularly inserted into your posts. Viewers of your blogs look to you for new information. Providing them with links pertaining to their specific interests can be mutually beneficial.

Place links to things such as personal entrepreneurial opportunities off to the side in a neat manageable location that readers may explore as they wish. Whatever style you choose, be it to stay on or off topic, keep it consistent as they way you choose to offer you information, and in what way you offer it is what is going to regulate whether or not people return to your blog. - 16747

About the Author: