The heart of the blog is blog content. So if you want to make your blog professional you must have original content. Effective unique content always draws more visitors and the main factor of SEO of blogging.
What is Good Content?
What really ‘good content’ is! Good content may be defined by
various factors. Specifically good content for a blog is the unique and
original content that meets the demand of visitors.
In this post I will discuss some of the elements of good content
and how will you create it. At most points along the way there will be debate
but hopefully out of it readers will be able to mix and match the elements and
identify what works for them.
So without any more introductory remarks, lets get into it with
the first element of writing quality content:
Uniqueness- For making your blog professional and successful your content must be unique. The basic way of original content is create your own. Another way is you can make original content by rewriting.
While I would also recommend that you start with yourself as a
blogger and blog out of your own passions, experiences and knowledge – it is
essential that you are aware of your reader and that you create content that
will add something to their lives. Give them something useful.
What is ‘useful’ content?
Of course ‘useful content’ to me is different from what it is to
you, but could be any of the following:
Entertainment –
increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them
for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
Education – some blog readers are
primarily interested in learning something about a given topic.
Information – many
successful blogs are built on the thirst that some have to be informed on an
issue, product or topic
Debate – some blog readers
want a place that they can have a good old fashioned dialogue, debate or even a
fight over an issue
News – many blog readers just want
to be kept up to date in a field
Community – I’m aware of some
very successful blogs that tap into the need that people have to connect and
belong. Quite often the topic is secondary to these connections.
Bring together the elements of both Useful and Unique
content and you will be one step closer to a successful blog.
My
main advice on ‘orginal’ content is that writing is generally a new type or
format that is useful to your readers and is not found on the web.
My main advice on ‘orginal’ content is that
writing is generally best as it won’t be found anywhere else in that form –
however clever and fair use of other people’s content (always giving credit for
it and using it within a ‘fair use’ way – ie only using short quotes’) CAN be
worth doing IF you use it in a way that is useful to your readers.
Research your Readership
Perhaps the best advice that I
could give on developing useful content is to research your readership (or
potential readership). If you already have a blog do this by surveying your
readers (either formally or informally) or by asking for feedback. I regularly
seek out the opinion of my blog readers to find out what their needs and
desires are in the topic I’m talking about. If you don’t have a blog already
then you’ll need to work a little harder to research your potential readers. I
tend to survey friends, look a lot at other people’s blogs on a topic
(especially their comments section to see what types of questions people are
asking) and particularly look hard in forums and discussion groups on topics
where there is usually a lot of question asking going on. As you do this you’ll
begin to put your finger on what people are wanting and what you might be able
to provide to meet these needs.
Unique Content
Another factor to consider when
thinking about ‘good content’ is whether it is ‘unique’.
With a blog being created every
second and with blogs on virtually every topic you can think of, the challenge
for bloggers is to build a blog that stands out from the crowd. I see blogs
every day that provide ‘useful’ content that have no readers simply because
people are finding that information in other places.
Distinguish yourself
My advice to new bloggers trying to
break into a topic where others are already blogging is to take a surf through
the other blogs and websites in your niche and do some analysis upon what sort
of content that they are producing. In most niches you’ll find that sites are
all presenting very similar information in pretty much the same voice, tone and
style. As a new blogger on the topic you have a choice – you can either
replicate what they are doing and try to do it better (difficult as they will
already have loyal readers and unless you’re brilliant at it you’re unlikely to
convert these readers over to you) OR you can distinguish yourself in someway
from what others are doing.
This might mean tackling a slightly
different topic (perhaps a sub-niche) but could also mean writing in a distinct
voice (take a look at Manolo’s blog for an example of a blogger who has grown a
cult audience by writing about an odd combination of topics as an anonymous
blogger writing in the third person). It might also mean writing in a different
genre of posts (ie if everyone else is writing ‘newsy’ posts you might like to
write more ‘opinion’ type posts).
Bring together the elements of both
Useful and Unique content and you will be one
step closer to a successful blog.
Original Content – You will
notice that I have chosen the world ‘unique’ instead of ‘original’ in this
post. There is mixed opinion in blogging circles on whether original content is
always best. Regular readers of this blog know that not all my posts here are
completely ‘original’. There are some posts where I use short excerpts (quotes)
from other blogs as part of my blog entries. For example in a earlier post in
this series on ‘what is a blog‘ I used a number of quotes from other bloggers
as part of the post. As a result that post might not be classified as
‘original’ as such – but it is somewhat ‘unique’ (and hopefully useful) as I
put them together in a way that they had not been used before (side by side)
and then added my own comments to them.
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