When you are starting to think about doing your own blog, one of the great questions is “what makes a great blog?” I know I did and I spent a lot of time out on the blogosphere just trying to figure out which blogs were good and which ones were not as good and which ones were just flat out bad. Not many bad ones, fortunately.
Writers, of course, are more specialized and have specific needs in a blog, especially when a writer wants to market their work. So, I’ve spent the last month going through lots of different sites and determining what a great writer blog should contain. All seven criteria are found in Seven Criteria for Evaluating Writers Blogs.
The first was what every great blog contains: great content. Here are four ways to evaluate the content in a blog:
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The content is on target for your market. If you write mysteries, your blog content appeals to those readers who also like to read and write mysteries. If you write non-fiction articles and books on pets, your content should be around pets.
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Original Content. If all you do is parrot news articles, other blog points, and quote others, there is no reason to read your blog — except to find those who do have the original content. There are a surprising number of blogs whose authors are right out there at the bleeding edge of thought leadership for their particular topic. Perfect sense, too: their blog is usually about their passion and a tremendous amount of learning takes place by a blog author. They naturally, then, develop strong leadership in the blog topic — which then enhances their original content.
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Content extends the conversation. The other part of content is quoting others in their work. You might think this a contradiction to Original Content, but the difference is this: you take the idea presented in another’s posting and add new and original thinking to the content quoted. This extends the conversation and conversations are happening all the time in the blogosphere.
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Consistent publishing. My standard, that I hit rarely in my two years of blogging, is one post per weekday. Weekends off, so to speak. I don’t hit every weekday, no doubt about that. But going too long without posting is dangerous in an age of RSS readers and instant unsubscription to your blog.
Now, you can argue that these four content points apply to all blogs, not just writer blogs. You’d be right.
The trick on these four points is to stay consistent to your work as a writer. The purpose of this blog is using technology to market your work. Not grammar. Not publishing books. Not signing writing contracts. Not how I spent last weekend in Port Townsend with my wife enjoying life.
Instead, I have to consistently post original content and content that extends conversations (hard to do with a technology blog for writers!!) on my blog’s purpose.
It’s both easy and hard at the same time. Write twenty posts and see how well you mix up the four content points on your blog.
Scot
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