Welcome to my first blog post on Enterprise 2.0. Today, i will be introducing some of my strategies to be successful in blogging.
Why i blog?
Apart from fulfilling my assignment requirements, i would like to establish myself as an Enterprise 2.0 consultant (wannabe) to help organisations improve their business. Blogging is a great way to help market yourself or for any organisation to gain online recognition and at the same time, build their digital reputation.
1) Investing time and commitment
It is always going to take a fair amount of time to write something that will capture the imagination of your readers. Doing your own research on something that you have no prior knowledge on is of utmost importance to your preparation before writing, therefore one must be willing to fork out a period of uninterrupted personal time to just sit down and focus on the task at hand.
What this means is that it will potentially require you to sacrifice a couple of hours of your own personal time (family? TV? napping?) to write this one single blog post. It is a trade-off often required to produce quality work and it will mean taking time away from something else. It is not enough to just post regularly for a couple of days and then totally stop posting for a month. How fast would you stop visiting that blog if all of a sudden the author stopped posting for a couple of weeks?
The reality of being a successful blogger is to write regularly and consistently, therefore one must find the time to do it. They deserve your best and it takes ample time to create your best. Finding the perfect balance between time and consistency is a huge challenge most bloggers will face.
Bottom line: Time and effort is required to produce a smashing piece of work!
2) Marketing your blog
Search engines will still be able to locate your blog but to make it highly accessible to the entire audience out there on the internet, you have to put in the effort to make sure that people know about the existence of your blog. It is pointless to have built a great blog but no one comes knocking on your doors. Leverage social book marking tools such as “Digg“, StumbleUpon and Blog Carnival as part of your marketing strategies. Link your blog to other social networking tools that you use normally such as Facebook and Twitter!
A simple way to engage more readers out there is by commenting. Readers can potentially be bloggers themselves. It’s almost like having a conversation so as much as possible, try to be actively involved in commenting on other blogs. Link your blog to other blogs and be part of the blogging community! Ask good questions and give them a run for their money. This way, a discussion can be initiated between one party to another.
Bottom line: Don’t hide your blog. Let the world know of its existence!
3) First impression counts!
A boring headline will not attract people to start clicking and reading but an interesting one will. Here are some articles from Copyblogger on how to create better headlines, 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work and How to write magnetic headlines. Another important aspect of creating a good first impression are the opening sentences that you use to get your reader’s attention. Here’s an article from Copyblogger about 5 good ways to start your blog post with a bang.
A neat and organised layout for your blog helps a lot. Present your article in a way that is easy to read and navigate. I have encountered blog posts that were too “colorful” for my liking and it was difficult to read. Spend quality time on formatting and make it presentable.
Bottom line: Do not turn off your readers at the first time!
4) The reader-centred approach
The most important factor is to provide value to your readers. This value could be in the form of articles that provide practical tips to improve your daily life. It could also be recipe guides for house wives who want to cook a healthy meal for the family with cost-cutting ingredients or in-depth movie reviews to help movie goers make up their mind before hitting the cinema.
The more value your post can provide to your readers, the more likely they are going to revisit your blog or recommend it to friends, leading to increased readership and online recognition. I’m an avid reader of tech-blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo. I always feel that i learned something new each time i visit one of those blogs and that’s the value they provided me: more knowledge and insights on the latest mobile gadgets and technologies.
Bottom line: Post something that will benefit your readers!
5) Learn from others
Learn the good things, dump the bad things. There are a thousand and one examples on the internet on how to create a good blog. As mentioned in the above points, there are websites that provide useful tips on how to be successful in blogging. Taking these tips on board will shorten your learning curve on blogging the right way. Positivity blog, Problogger and Copyblogger are 3 excellent resources. On the flip side, here are 5 bad examples that you should NEVER follow!
Bottom line: Don’t learn it the hard way! Try to get it right the first time!
Here are some useful links and references:
- 10 commandments to successful blogging
- 5 pre-requisites for blogging success
- Positivity blog
- Problogger
- Copyblogger
Hope you’ve learned something new from me today and I’m looking forward to my next post. But before you leave, here’s an interesting video on how you can increase traffic for your blog! Till next week people, cheers!
Jerome's 
A great overview and introduction to blogging. I like your examples you’ve used here – I might have to add Copyblogger to my feed reader.
Thanks for your comments. Copyblogger was really useful.
Hi ,
nice to meet you .After read your article ,i really agreed with your point about learning from others .We can see what they wrote ,how they managed and etc.We can get some ideas through looking for others ,although before we did not know what should we do .
Also i hope you can enjoy blogging !
Cheers
Yup, if you can learn from others, you will also be able to avoid the mistakes they make, thus shorten your learning curve and path a faster way to success!
Great advice, I’ll be using some of these tip when i finally work out what i want my blog to be about. i don’t suppose you have any tips regarding that
Hey mate,
you can always blog on something that you are passionate about. Current news or issues that are going on around the world can be a good source of inspiration for a start.
Hi Jerome,
When I finished reading your blog this week, I think you will be a great Enterprise 2.0 Consultant !! 🙂
I think you have covered a great deal of how to make successful blogs. Also, I agree with you all about the tips and strategy you have mentioned. I think it’s important to have a great first impression for visitors by making effort in searching, good writing and blog designing, so that they can read your blogs. And the provided examples were great as well.
Great post, keep up the work !
Thanks mate. It’s very flattering to hear that from you. I look forward to your next post!
Interesting post, classified ideas, enjoyed. Just take care about some grammatical errors and support your ideas with some resources, if any. Keep Going and good luck.
Thanks for the comments, will keep them in mind. 🙂
Really entertaining blog post, even though you include a lot of information, it doesn’t seem arduous or painful to read. I really enjoyed your inclusion of the ‘bottom line’ for those too lazy to read the whole thing!
Keep up the good work!
I was worried that my post was getting too long so i tried to somethings up a little bit.