Make your blog a must read and avoid first blog pitfalls

I started blogging seriously just since December 24, 2008 (although I created this blog on April 2007 :) ) for following reasons

• Past few years, I was really inspired by
  • technical blogs of Scott Gu , Omar Al Zabir , Matt Berseth
  • personal blogs of my friends Sobee(this guy stopped writing for past 3 years or so..not sure why..) , Yagyaraman & recently Anand Nataraj
• One day, I want my blog to be inspiration to other bloggers :)

Since new to blogging, have browsed around web for things like

• how to make a blog interesting
• do’s and don’ts
• how to drive traffic
• possible pitfalls etc.,

After reading a bunch of articles, I thought why don’t I share the info which I found useful to me. After all, essence of Web 2.0 , Web 3.5 is all about sharing. And more so, I read that every desktop/laptop is a data center in the age of Web 3.5 :)

Hence I am starting with the first post in this series ‘blogging for beginners’ where I am going to share my views about

• Making your blog a must read
• Avoid first blog pitfalls

Make your blog a must read

Although this topic is not for beginners, it is useful for us to know how to make your blog a must read so that we are all prepared from our first few posts itself :)

On this topic, I came across an interesting article 5 Ways to Imitate the 10 Most Popular Blogs by Easton Ellsworth where he says following are 5 unmistakable ways to make your blog just like the 10 most popular blogs in the world

• Publish frequently.
• Have a team. Note that this might not apply to beginners…
• Offer hot news.
• Have an attitude.
• Be visual.

Avoid first blog pitfalls

As a first time blogger, we always try too many things by adding series of plug-ins, widgets, gadgets, images, videos and sometimes even ads where we might not now if they are useful or distraction to our blog readers.

Here is good article titled Avoiding First Blog Pitfalls by timethief where she advises us to avoid these pitfalls

• Too many posts on the front page (too slow to load)
• Too many images (too slow to load)
• Too many animated icons, embeds, etc.
• Broken links
• Not updated frequently enough

After 20+ days of some serious blogging, I realized that blog is like a wine and does take time to taste better for you and more so to your readers(by the way, I am a teetotaler :) )

Your writing, vision, ideas gets better and better as you start writing posts regularly. You can see this difference by going through your previous posts and clearly feel how much you have improved over your posts. As you became older… you became wiser and intellectual :)

So don’t expect heavy traffic to your newly started blog… allow it to grow by taking care, nurture it and after some time, you will reap the benefits…

Happy blogging…