About Blog: Make your blog famous

So you have a niche, you've found somewhere to host your blog, and you've set yourself up with a desktop editing application. What's next?

Well, it might be worth thinking about the way that you present your content, and how you can make it truly jump off the screen and grab your readers attention. A lot of beginning bloggers will write something more appropriate to an essay than to a blog post. Here are a few pieces of advice that make sure that you leave a lasting impression on your readers.

Perhaps the most important part of any blog post is the title.

Why's that?

Because that's what will make a reader that finds your content through a search engine decide whether to visit your website or not. This is the make or break point that determines whether you get read or passed over in favour of someone else's content.

Robin Good, in his article on How To Write Great Titles And Headlines For The Web notes that:

"Do not try to make the title "smart", by using irony, word play or other "journalistic" approach.

The title to be built must be thought as of a label to your article in the unlimited virtual library that the Internet is.

Inside newspapers the reader is already captive and searching, within the page, for items of possible interest.

On the Internet, headlines are often displayed out of context. The reader is searching for your content and will only get to it, if a most appropriate, serious and well thought out label is attached to it. On the web, readers often don't get the chance of applying background understanding to the interpretation of the titles they are presented with.

Just like in a real library."

This is just one of several essential pieces of advice that Robin gives on titling for the web. Of course you want your titles to be snappy and maybe even funny, but if this is at the expense of ever being read, it makes perfect sense to adopt a more pragmatic approach.

Once you have a great title the next thing worth thinking about is what happens when your reader actually arrives at your website. Sure, it would be nice to think that they will read everything you wrote once they've clicked through. In actual fact, a lot of readers will disappear from a site in seconds unless they are captivated and encouraged to stay.

Muhammad Saleem writes for CopyBlogger that:

"Readers will often read content diagonally to determine its usefulness before giving it a proper read. And in order to pass this direct filter test, you need to write for “diagonal” readers who scan your content from headline to close in a zig zag pattern."

Muhammad suggests that you have ten seconds to convince that reader to continue and dip into your full post. I would say that figure is closer to five seconds.

So how do you make your text "scannable"?

Robin Good provides some excellent tips on writing for the web in his post Information: Beginners Blog Design. Here Robin points out such techniques as "chunking":

"Chunking is an approach to the formatting of the text that strives to "modularize" contents into the greatest number of meaningful text blocks possible. Similarly to what is done in poetry, each concept and idea is given greater space to be read and understood. There is no packing of paragraphs into long blocks of text that know no pause. There is no saving in having less digital screen space used...

... A must-abide to rule to use when wanting to chunk content effectively is the one of never going to the next line after a period. Either you proceed on the same line with the following sentence, or you leave an empty line and start a new paragraph below. "

Robin also suggests that bolding can be used effectively as a means for readers to scan your content:

"In order to facilitate readers scanning page contents, it is a great idea to use some "bolding" to highlight the first three or four words of content paragraphs that are particularly important.

In contrast then with traditional editorial and formatting approaches where bolding is used in the middle of sentences to emphasize relevant content elements, my personal suggestions is to use bold to again highlight opening words of critical paragraphs."

Robin finally suggests that the use of images in your posts is an all but essential component that will really help to grab your readers attention.

But where are you going to find those?