F3YRecipes for Life

Recipes For Life

Elements of a Good Blog

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Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Whether you want to start a blog as a hobby to document something you love or you want to blog to eventually bring in an income, launching it the right way will give you a solid foundation for future growth. When you’re just getting started, you’ll need to make a lot of important decisions to make your blog the best it can be. What does your blog need to really stand out above the rest? How can you create a blog that will bring visitors back again and again? These six steps can help you create a professional, distinguished and valuable blog where visitors want to spend time on a daily basis.

1.         Choose your niche. Having an “all-purpose” blog is rarely the best approach to blogging. The more specific the subject of your blog, the better. Narrow down your focus as much as possible. The narrower your focus, the more targeted audience you’ll acquire. Finding your target audience means that you’ll find intelligent readers who want to come back every day. Even if your subject of interest is peculiar, you’ll still find plenty of readers who are interested in the same thing. Know your niche and stick to it.

2.         Establish your domain, design and brand. The overall appearance of your blog will have a big effect on how much time visitors spend there and whether they continue to come back. The appearance of your blog includes everything from the domain, to the design to consistent visual branding across all your pages. If possible, buy and register your domain. Choosing one company for design, web hosting and domain registration will make upkeep, maintenance and future troubleshooting much easier. A professional can also suggest the best domain type, help you design a user-friendly page and help establish a personal brand.

3.         Make your blog’s purpose clear. Visitors to your blog should be able to know its purpose and function within minutes of arriving. Have an easy-to-find about me, purpose or vision page that’s reachable from your main landing page. On that page, explain your blog’s main subject, area of focus and overall purpose. Be sure to keep it fairly brief – something a visitor could read and digest in a few minutes.

4.         Know your opinion, stance and voice. No matter what your blog’s subject is, you need an established voice, stance and opinion on the matter. Make sure they are all your own. You’re the only blogger with your unique perspective, and it’s wise to use your personal stance to the fullest. Don’t try to replicate another opinion or be a copycat of another blog.

5.         Know your audience. Understanding the types of visitors your blog is likely to attract and knowing what they want to read is important for writing focused content relevant to your visitor’s interests. Creating content that your ideal target audience wants to read is important for maintaining readers and attracting new visitors.

6.         Consistent posting schedule. Once your blog is set up, keeping it updated regularly is your number one priority. Creating a content posting calendar and sticking to it can help you plan to keep your blog updated. On your calendar, be sure to consider holidays and weekends. You’ll still want to update your blog on weekends, but you may be able to skip a few major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.

 

These six tips can help you create a professional-level blog that will keep visitors coming back for new, fresh content on a regular basis. A specific niche, beautiful appearance, clear purpose, unique stance and great content will help you create a blog that’s worth reading.

How to use tags in WordPress posts

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If you are using WordPress you will notice the option to create tags for your post. But what are tags, and how are they different from categories?

The confusion over what tags do, and how to use them well, leads to a host of problems that can affect your search engine optimization. For example, you may be using too many tags for a short post, or using tags only once. This leads to issues like duplicate content and really, really ineffective website organization. Here are some things you need to know about using WordPress tags. [Read more…]

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Anyone can write a blog–in fact, it’ll take you less than 10 minutes to set up a free account. Unfortunately, about 99% of the blogs that are polluting the Internet today aren’t worth reading. You see a lot of personal rants, bad grammar, and a whole lot of information that (quite frankly) nobody wants to know. ‘Oh, I’m so bored, I really don’t know what to say.’ Duh, then why are you saying it?

Here are tips on how to improve the quality of your personal blog posts. This article can help you break through blog writer’s block, and create content that your fans—yes, fans!—will want to read, building traffic and your reputation. [Read more…]

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Tips for setting up your first blog

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Blogging has become the great equalizer for people who want to express their thoughts in the written word. Anyone who wants to express themselves, talk about their day, or discuss their favorite hobbies or obsessions will find a ready audience if they start a blog. If you want to start blogging but don’t know how to go about it just follow these handy tips.

The first thing you need to do is to choose the free blog sites that will host your blog. There are many free blog sites you can use. A cursory search on the key words ‘free blogs’ will result in many links to a great number of free blog sites. Some of the most popular sites are blogspot.com, livejournal.com, wordpress.com and blogger.com. Choose the site that you want to use. If you’re not sure about which one you want to use you can research first on the internet and read the reviews for these different services. You can also ask your friends who are already blogging for their recommendations.

When you’ve finally chosen the site you want to use, register to get an account. Remember that sites like these will ask for an email address so have the address you intend to use for your blog ready. There are some bloggers who prefer to make a separate address for things like blogging so that they can keep their primary email address private. This is a personal preference so just decide whether you want to have a separate email address or if you want to just use your primary email address.

Now that you have an account you can now access the blogging platform of the site you’ve chosen. From here you can now customize your blog. One of the keys to a good blog is to make it as individualized as possible without sacrificing design aesthetics and readability. Designing your blog is easy using these sites because they already provide several templates that has the basic structure and from there you can just build up on it. One thing you should probably invest some time to work on (or money if you want to hire a professional) is to develop a masthead that is truly unique to your blog. It tremendously helps you create an identity for your blog.

Finally, it’s time to write. But before you do, you really should think about your blog first. What do you envision for your blog? What topics do you want to discuss? A good rule of thumb is to stick to a particular theme or to a particular topic. If you’re going to write a blog on your love for music, it may be a good idea to focus on a specific genre and just talk from that perspective.

Finally, when you do start blogging, do so regularly. By writing regularly you will help build your readership because readers will expect to see fresh content whenever they visit.

Photo from comluv.com