Web Design Marquette, MI | Middle Ear Media

How to Blog (Part 1)

July 25th, 2011

So, you finally have your own blog. Now what? You’ve been anx­iously await­ing the moment, and now that you have the abil­ity to share your thoughts with the entire world, you can’t think of any­thing to say. Maybe you feel intim­i­dated by the whole con­cept of a world-wide pub­lish­ing sys­tem at your fin­ger­tips. Maybe the user inter­face of your blog­ging soft­ware or CMS (Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem) is con­fus­ing and dif­fi­cult to use. Maybe you’re sec­ond guess­ing your own ideas.

What­ever the rea­son, it must be over­come. Whether your blog is for your busi­ness or just an out­let for your per­sonal ideas, to be suc­cess­ful, you must pro­duce inter­est­ing con­tent. Here are some guide­lines and tips to help get your blog up and running.

1. Famil­iar­ize your­self with WordPress.

One of the main rea­sons why you wanted a blog was so that you could make updates your­self. To do this, you must be famil­iar with and able to use your blog­ging soft­ware or Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem. If pos­si­ble, have some­body show you how to log in and make posts, etc. First hand expe­ri­ence is always best. If nobody is avail­able to assist you, you can find lots of use­ful infor­ma­tion online. If that’s not work­ing for you, you can hire some­one to teach you how to use WordPress.

(Did I men­tion that I’m avail­able for WP instruc­tion and consultation?)

2. Write your post before log­ging in.

Don’t try to write your post from the Add New Post page in the Word­Press Admin panel. Even if you’ve become famil­iar with Word­Press, you’ll be more pro­duc­tive if you write your ideas down on paper or in a word proces­sor first. This is a more com­fort­able writ­ing envi­ron­ment for the major­ity of peo­ple. It will allow you to focus on the con­tent of your blog post instead of being dis­tracted by other ele­ments of the Word­Press inter­face. Most of us have too many dis­trac­tions already. So, why add more?

3. Don’t copy or scrape content.

Cre­ate your own con­tent and be orig­i­nal. It’s not only uneth­i­cal and pos­si­bly ille­gal to copy or scrape con­tent from other blogs, it can actu­ally be detri­men­tal to your SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion). When the same con­tent is found on mul­ti­ple pages by a search engine, it could result in a lower search rank­ing for both of them. Also, if the site you copied from is more pop­u­lar than yours (which is likely if you’re using their con­tent), your site will be pushed down in the search rank­ings. If you find it absolutely nec­es­sary to inform your audi­ence of some other con­tent, write up a brief sum­mary and why you think it’s impor­tant to your read­ers. Don’t for­get to include a link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle and give credit to the orig­i­nal author.

If you can’t think of any ideas or top­ics for your own posts, stay tuned for How to Blog (Part 2) com­ing soon.

4. Don’t worry about perfection.

Of course you want your blog post to be per­fect, but don’t let that stop you from gen­er­at­ing con­tent. Remem­ber, you can always edit your posts after they are pub­lished. That being said, please spell-check, proof-read, and dou­ble check every­thing before post­ing. In most many cases, the bulk of the traf­fic that a page gen­er­ates comes shortly after it is posted.

So please, take the time to nur­ture your blog. Con­sider your audi­ence, cre­ate qual­ity con­tent con­sis­tently and you will see an increase in traf­fic. As usual, your com­ments and ques­tions are always welcome.

Tags: blog, CMS, Increase Traffic, SEO, WordPress

This entry was posted in the Blogging category.