Blog Success

When writing articles for your niche blog its easy to lose focus. Especially for those who keep up daily posting schedules, keeping on track, on topic and keeping it interesting and relevant can become difficult.

One way to combat this problem is to ask yourself these five questions about every article you write. If you have good answers to these questions, then go ahead and write the article. If you don’t, you might want to think about writing something else.

Who? Who am I writing for? Is it for me or for my audience? Always make sure you consider the perspective of your audience as you write. If you’re writing for yourself, put it in a journal.

What? What is the topic? Am I staying on topic throughout the article? Blog posts that try to cover too many topics at once get confusing. Stick to one topic per article.

When? When is this information from? Is this article timely? Am I writing about some topic that’s no longer relevant? Especially when responding to or working off of information you’ve found online make sure you check the dates and make sure that you article is something people will find interesting today.

Why? Why am I writing this article? Does it offer something; a unique point of view, helpful advice, a useful review? Sometimes it is easy to create content just for contents sake, but if it isn’t offering anything to your readers, they won’t read it so you might as well not write it.

How? How is this article related to my niche? It doesn’t always have to be specifically about the core topic of your niche blog, but at least make sure its related enough so that the same audience will find it interesting.

Give the questions a try and see if they don’t help you to know when you are writing good niche blog content and when you are just writing.

When I’m reading something on the internet, I can deal with a few typos. One or two words that have transposed letters or an omitted word here and there I’m basically fine with. I even do it myself from time to time. I won’t lie, it bothers me. I notice it and cringe and wonder why didn’t they catch that when they proofread it, especially when its my writing (it makes me shiver just thinking about it), but I can deal with it.

But that’s it. Anything more than that and I’m a goner, never to return, adios muchacho, goodnight and goodluck.

Am I being unreasonable? Is my reaction unusual? You know, I don’t think it is.

If you look around the internet at popular blogs one thing you will notice about all of them is that they are well edited. Is that a coincidence? I, again, think not.

There are plenty of blogs out there that are full of typos and misspellings and horrific bone chilling grammar and, lo and behold, none of them ever amount to anything. Some of them may even express some interesting concepts and offer great insights into particular niches but it doesn’t matter. If your blog is not well edited, it will never be successful.

That’s why the most important step to creating great content for your blog is to make sure you edit, proofread, edit again, spell check, edit, read it aloud and then do some editing. Okay, that might be overkill, but I hope you are getting the idea that good editing is crucial to the success of your blog.

Its not that people are inherently grammar Nazis. Its just that reading is a lot to ask of people. If they don’t think you are putting forth as much effort in producing the words as they are putting into reading them, you aren’t likely to attract many return readers.

In my opinion, the best method for self editing your content before posting it to your blog is to first use a good spell checker and then read the writing aloud. By actually speaking the words aloud you will greatly improve your chances of catching omitted words or improper usages.

Whatever method you use just make sure you take the time to edit to the best of your ability. Trust me, there is no such thing as great writing that is full of errors and there is no error free writing that is all that bad. If your content is well edited then you are already over halfway to the well written, informative and interesting content your blog needs to be a success.

If I wanted to start a new blog on some niche topic and make it successful I would not start a blog on dog grooming techniques. I like dogs, especially well groomed ones. I also know a little something about starting blogs. And a blog on dog grooming techniques has a reasonable chance of being a successful niche blog. But there is one major problem. I don’t know anything about, nor am I overly interested in, dog grooming techniques.

I won’t go as far as to say that it is impossible to have a successful blog on some niche topic you know nothing about. I’m sure with the investment of enough time and effort it can be, and has been, done. What I will say is that if you want to produce great well written, informative and interesting content for your blog, especially without having to spend hours on research for every blog post, then writing about a subject you have some knowledge of is the only way to go.

If you hope to gain any sort of audience for your blog, one of your major considerations should be whether or not your posts would be considered informative or interesting by your intended audience. The chances of meeting either of these criteria for people who have an interest in reading about a particular subject (which hopefully your intended audience does) when you have no interest or knowledge of that subject yourself, is slim to none. Your best bet for creating content others will consider great is always going to be writing about a subject that you know more about, or have more information about, than your audience does.

Not that you need to be an expert on any particular subject to start a blog. That’s not what I’m saying. But you should have at least a cursory knowledge of the topic and an interest in learning more about it. This way you will hopefully be able to understand any interesting relevant information you run across that you can then include in your blog posts, as well as present topics and discussions that your readers will find beneficial.

Most readers are pretty savvy and can spot a phony from a ways off. So, even if you aren’t overly familiar with the subject, make sure you’ve done sufficient research to know what you are talking about before you start talking about it.

If you do know your topic well, then writing great content is easy. The better you know it, the easier it will be. When you are writing on a subject you are familiar with and enjoy discussing, you will be amazed at how effortless it is to create content that others will come back for again and again.

We all know that, in the world of blogging, interesting, informative, well written content is king. Anyone who has spent any time reading anything about the art of blogging has had this said to them in ten thousand different ways by ten thousand different blogging gurus. What we don’t see nearly as often though, is information on what constitutes interesting, informative or well written content.

Here’s the thing. The fact that well written interesting information brings in visitors is easily determined by asking people why they read the blogs they read, or even just considering why you, yourself, read the blogs you read. No one says, “Well, I like to spend my time perusing useless boring pages full of grammatical errors.” Telling bloggers they need good content to attract readers is like telling a restaurateur they need good food to attract diners. It actually should go without saying.

The other part isn’t so easy to determine. The reason what constitutes good content is difficult and something you don’t see discussed as often is because there is no one answer. What any given individual considers well written, informative or interesting isn’t necessarily what any other individual considers to be the same. How many times have you seen a movie or book blasted by some critics and praised by others? As the old saying goes, “you can’t please all the people all the time”.

But, this is not to say there aren’t steps you can take to help you meet all the criteria for enough people to gain a sizable audience. Remember that same saying also says “you can please some of the people all of the time” and, in blogging, that is really what you should be looking to do.

Over the next few posts we will take a look at what we can know about how to write well and be informative and entertaining for an audience. Though these tips probably wont be enough to lead to your becoming the next Pulitzer winner, if you think about these simple concepts as they relate to your blogging, you will at the least be headed down the right path to creating the type of well written interesting and informative content needed to write a successful niche blog.