A few weeks ago Matt posted some tips for better blogging on his site. Since I have been tagged I have been wracking my brain for tips and finally I stopped thinking about it and the thoughts came naturally. So without further delay, here are a few of my thoughts…
Do what comes naturally. What makes your blog great is that it is your blog. It carries your signature in design, layout, and wording. It should also carry your interest. How can you follow through with blogging if you don’t like what you write about? Don’t force yourself to write what you think people will read - write about your passions and the readers will come.
Don’t follow the crowd. You can’t compete with the big guys and why should you. When have you ever heard someone say that they read Slashdot because it is like another site? There are a lot of news items I don’t post to Linuxchic.net even though they are relevant to this site because I don’t feel I have to if it is all over the net already. The items I post are the items I really don’t want to go unnoticed…the things I feel passionate about. I come back to this tip myself a lot lately. I am working on a site, alternageek.com and with it is a podcast. This is my first venture into podcasting and of course I want listeners! There are already so many great podcasts out there I don’t want to compete with all of them; I want to contribute to them. I want people to listen because my podcast is different than other podcasts and I hope it enhances their playlist.
Keep it simple and narrow your topic. One blogger cannot cover everything so keep your topic to a more narrow scope. You want a technology blog? How about whittling that down to gadgets, a specific operating system, or a web technology. You can cover multiple topics, but keep the meat in the thing you are passionate about the most. I cover quite a bit here at Linuxchic.net including gadgets and Internet technologies that I think are cool but my biggest focus here is Linux. Of course that means I have to keep a separate blog for my personal needs but that is ok…I don’t want to drown my readers with irrelevant information.
