Blogging provides an excellent platform for the creative and aspiring writers to carve a niche for themselves and share their writing. The trend of blogging is on a high these days and lot of individuals are stepping out of their own inner insecurities of being read (and perhaps being judged afterwards) and are confidently sharing with the world audience, their own feelings and opinions, voicing their thoughts, and yes the people are listening – reading rather.
One of the most sensible advantages of using blogs for sharing your write ups is that you need not go in and search for audience. You just have to write and your blog key words post will find the audience for itself. It can be liked and shared by the users who have read it, on their social networking websites. Today, the social networks are so inter linked that it does not take much time to spread the write up in the contacts.
However, there is a difference between writing the content for your blog and writing the same to be published in the journals or buy content, newspapers, etc. Reading the content on the websites or blogs has an in built disadvantage as the users, since their schooling stages have grown accustomed to reading the quality content in hard bound way, in the form of the book or a magazine etc. The concentration span of an online reader is by itself low, besides they are haunted by innumerable distractions. Obviously a person will not log in just to read the quality content (though exceptions always exists) but they will be simultaneously active on their social networking profiles, perhaps downloading songs side by side, working on a project and etc. Thus the content for blogs need to be highly precise and engaging and must be presented in a very engaging way.
It could be quite overpowering and frustrating for the bloggers to understand why their blog is not successful as yet, even though they are trying their level best. Due to the lack of engaging and quality content, a blog fails to become a successful and profitable affair. The write up discusses various tips which you can use, in order to turn into a really successful blogger and come up with highly impressive, relevant and meaningful content for the Internet users.
1. Get your basics right
Well, this point is not aimed to tell you that your linguistic skills are not up to the mark, but it is advisable to brush through the basic knowledge of the language, its various figures of speech, grammar, active voice and passive voice, various types of sentence creation, subject verb agreement, conditionals and etc. This is evern more important for such bloggers who are writing in a given language which is not their native language / mother tongue.
For instance, an Indian whose mother tongue might be Tamil or Hindi is writing in English. The rules of different languages differ, and more often than not we end up mixing up the both. The online readers are very picky and quite high headed. Any glitch in the grammar reason, any mistake in the usage of words etc, and your blog will be abandoned forever by the users. What’s worst? You even run the risk of being a laughing stock in your immediate community. However brushing up your language skills not only helps you in creating good quality content, but also is a plus point through out your life.
2. Read more and be relevant
As a writer, it is important that you keep yourself updated with the styles around you. Read more, not just books and novels, but perhaps other successful blogs, popular magazines and etc. Identify the latest styles in languages, the latest cool words, slang rather and other ways of writing. If your expressions are up to date, it helps the readers associate well with your blog. You can also include the present day examples in your ranking; for example talking about how Internet, especially social media, helps in creating stars. You can talk about Justin Bieber, the young star who got lucky after his mother uploaded his videos on youtube, or perhaps about Adele who was discovered on MySpace.
3. Organize your efforts
Though as a writer you may tend to be swayed with your mood swings, get an obsessive – compulsive outburst to write at 3 in the morning and then lay low eventually for two three days altogether, but that is not a constructive approach towards writing quality content. Quality in today’s time is synonymous with consistency. Thus you must try to produce quality content each day, every day. Don’t let the inner feral instincts take over. Instead dedicate the particular hours of the day to creating the quality content. Once you schedule the timings, all of your efforts are focused at one single point. If you follow this tip, soon you will realize that at a prescribed point of time, when you sit down to write, the idea will automatically began to glide in your minds and before you would know, your write up will be complete.
4. Remember the search for topics never ends
The topic for your next blog may come to you while sipping coffee with your friend in coffee house, or while window shopping in the popular mall, or even while doing your laundry. Each and everything happening around us is a potent source of inspiration and all we have to do is be open.
5. Take a risk – take chance
This is perhaps an extension of the above point but as a writer, it is important for you to take certain risks and even walk on the edge by writing on controversial topics. All that matters is your freedom of speech should not come at the expense of someone else, and that you remain completely honest and transparent to yourself and your audience. Though a negative publicity is not really advertised here, but writing on controversial topics sure is the mean to attract more readers to your blog.
6. Don’t write, talk rather
Most of the times, bloggers end up being preachers or teachers, but fails to acknowledge the fact that it is a friend, a person is looking for on the Internet. Lets face it – a fervent Internet users must have felt lonely some point in their life and that is why they are on Internet – to connect in the most quickest way. Thus while blogging, use friendly tone, not a preaching tone. Parents does that better, anyway. If you have read Eat Pray Love you would know what being personal and the same time professional means. And just for the record, that novel was the worldwide best seller for over 187 weeks.
7. Proofread – Proofread – Proofread!
Perhaps you never required to brush up your linguistic skills. It was just your inability to proof read your content that let so many users abandon your content. While we are writing content, a lot of forces are working on us. And at the same time we may get swayed and do not pay attention to each and every word separately. By proof reading you check if you have written what exactly you wanted to convey. Proof reading is not only about checking the spelling or grammatical mistakes, but it involves ensuring that the meaning is come out to be exactly what you wanted.
The ultimate evaluating factor of the success of your blog is its content. Whether you are publishing reviews, producing podcasts, interviewing various local celebrities of the ordinary people who have achieved extraordinary accomplishments, every effort will be wasted if the content is not up to the mark. Create high quality and impressive content with the above mentioned tips and enjoy the sweet taste of success in blogging.
Article by Vishal
Vishal Gaikar is a professional blogger from Pune, India. If you like this post, you can follow him on Twitter.
