5 Blog Aspects to Revise in 2007 (Part I)
I read dozens of blogs daily, some of them are daily reads that i’ve been visiting for months, and some are new ones that i stumble through comments and links on other blogs or sites. The rise of John Chow in the blogosphere during the last quarter of 2006 surely got a reasonable number of entrepreneurs and webmasters to open their own personal & business blog and try to follow his success.
But is a success made with a personal blog something you should follow? I’d say no. Do you ask yourself what aspects of that personal-business blog led to that success? which aspects of this blog should you follow and do on your own blog, and which should you try to alternate and change?
Since i know that most of my readers at the moment have their own personal-business blog, this mini 2-posts series will be geared slightly towards this audience, and not necessarily applies to all kinds of blogs. I will try to address 5 aspects that in my opinion are a bit lacking on today’s blogs, not from a point of criticizing the entrepreneurs out there, but more of opening your eyes to aspects that you may have overlooked and not paid enough attention to.
Operation Codename: Brand Blog
If you’d ask me what is the most powerful attribute a blog can have, I’d say having/being a brand. This also applies to personal blogs, actually it mainly applies to personal blogs.
Let’s take a look at some of the more known personal entrepreneur/business blogs around. Why do people visit John Chow? because they are looking to read what a dot com mogul has to say. Why do people visit Jon Waraas? because they are looking to read what a fairly successful webmaster is doing. Why are they visiting ProBlogger? because he’s a Professional blogger, he must know what he’s talking about and he gives some solid advice.
Ever asked yourself why are people visiting your blog? are you sure it’s because of the content, the design, the authority? or is it just another junction they stop by to leave a comment and earn a visitor or two? are they visiting because of the brand content, design, writing style or name you created on your blog?
As i said earlier, gaining visitors and loyal readers is our target, branding is our bigger target. After reading this series, you may want to change 5 things in order to have a better chance of making a brand out of your personal blog. When i say brand i don’t mean a grandiose name that everybody chant, i mean that people will come to your blog because it’s your blog.
Aspect #1: Your Design
Just like when going to a job interview, you want to make sure your first-impression on the reader is a good one. Actually, first impressions on the internet are far more important, since you have seconds to convince your reader to stay, or leave. And in seconds they probably aren’t going to be reading your content, they’re gonna be looking at your design.
Have you noticed how many blogs are using the same theme as John Chow (Misty Look)? I started noticing this after visiting some blogs whom the owners of left comments on Chow’s blog, and i was really surprised to see the vast amount of blogs with this theme. How can you possibly create a brand when your theme is not only the same as one of the most visited personal blogs on the blogosphere, but also the same as your friend, and your friend’s friend, and his sister, too!?
Aspect #2: Your Posts Aesthetics
So you’ve got yourself a nice, somewhat-unique looking design, the reader decides to stay at your blog. Congratulations! Now he’s going to read one of your posts…wait, can he?
On many blogs I’ve been, i noticed that when the design itself is not too cluttered, the posts are. And they are very cluttered to the extent it’s quite annoying to read them. They are cluttered with either big Adsense ads blocks, that are literally 40% of all the text in the post, or quote blocks, emphasized, underlined, scrapped text, it’s OK to highlight the important parts of your posts, but don’t overdo it because you’ll end up with too many highlighted things.
Don’t forget to pay attention to spelling, punctuation and paragraph breaks. A long post is alright, but a very long paragraph may get your reader bored.
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Hi Allen,
You probably haven’t noticed that the misty theme is the second most popular downloaded theme on ThemeViewer, with over 26,000 downloads. It’s a very popular theme, and I’m guessing the majority who use the the theme are not followers of John Chow.
Perhaps, you should have given John Chow that advice on branding before he used the misty theme.
That is a good point though. We should all brand ourselves with different designs. Take your design for example, it seems very unique with a darker gloomy feel to it. That works! I hear what your saying.