My List of Blog Essentials
February 25th, 2005 by MelanieSo. In my humble opinion, these five questions are the ones that any blogger should consider before they start posting…
1. Is your information new or interesting? More specifically, do you have a new product to offer or an event to discuss? Do you have a fresh opinion on a topic? (Sometimes favorite subjects, *cough* Armstrong Williams, have been discussed to death, so unless you have a fresh approach they are best to avoid.)
2. Do you have a sense of humor, or at least a conversational style? It’s crucial to oberve the rules of grammar while blogging to maintain credibility, but if your posts aren’t fun or interesting to read, people will skip right over them.
3. Does you blog have personality? This is somewhat closely related to having a sense of humor, but not quite… I think that when you can get a feel for what people are like when you read their blogs, you connect with them on another level than just recieving information. For example, if you find that another blogger loves to bike even if that’s not what their blog is about you will be more inclined to read it if you share the interest.
4. Does your blog have a focus? Obviously small business and special interest blogs have a focus. And it would be easy to assume that all blogs do. But I disagree… a lot of the general PR blogs I have read feel too general and vague to me. Blogs can discuss an entire field, but they are a lot more interesting if they have a specific focus that they post about quite often. For example, PR blogs that deal a lot with technology or transparency in the media…
And finally-
5. Could anyone read your blog? Even if your blog is geared to a specific field of experts, when a blogger gets too heavy on the technical jargon too often, he or she is bound to lose readers. This is especially true in the case of blogs who have a somewhat technical focus, but are meant for public consumption. For example, the tinbasher’s blog… even though the focus of the blog is bending and welding metal (yawn), anyone can read the posts because they have a personal feel and they show the finished products of metal bending– which the general public can relate to better than a work in progress.
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Good advice, Melanie.
Better yet, you also followed your own advice. The information you list is not in wide circulation on blogs and is therefore fresh and interesting. You wrote in a conversational tone. Your post seemed focised on the topic of PR, and finally, you broke the page up into readable chunks that weren’t full of jargon.
You might consider submitting your post to the Carnival of the Capitalists which looks for fresh content on business blogging.
Your post is also short, concise and gives five easy to follow steps. This makes your post ideal for submission to any of the many ezine article sites. You might try that as an experiment.