In the first post of this mini-series i introduced the aim behind revising your blog aspects, and mentioned two visual aspects that you may want to look into and alternate so you can have a better trafficked, read and branded personal-business blog. If you still haven’t read the first part, you should do so before reading this sequel.

In this post I’m going to talk about three more aspects that in my opinion are lacking on a fairly big percentag of personal/business/entrepreneur blogs out there, remember - This is a blunt constructive criticizing post, I’m in no way trying to preach the crowd or “teach” you the drill, that is just my humble observation.

Aspect #3: Your Words

In the first part of this series i mentioned ‘brand’ as the most powerful attribute a blog can have. When building a brand, your words have a significant influence on your success or failure.

If you want to leverage your blog, you should work constantly on your wording. I’m the first to go against censorship, but if you take your blog seriously - You should invest some thought into what you say before hitting “Publish”.

I see a lot of bloggers that tend to use “narrow” words, words that in the better case make them seem as people who aren’t sure of their abilities and goals, and in the worse case like they don’t even know what their goals are. But the worst case is when people start using “wide” words, giving out sensational promises and releasing groundbreaking statements that don’t have any foundations.

Is your motivation stimulating enough for your readers to come back to your blog? are you showing them where are you heading next? is there any kind of sequence between your posts? is the risk of creating buzz and hype around your blog by giving promises you probably can’t fulfill worth it? sounding like a BS businessman is the last brand you want sticking to your name.

Aspect #4: Your Actions

Words and actions are a one puzzle piece when it comes to putting a brand blog together in the blogosphere, no to ways about it. Since i don’t want to turn this into an illustrative post, here’s a solid example:

Balance Between SEO & Catchy Titles is one of my best worded posts on this young blog so far. It contains useful information that can help any blogger do better with search engines. Written December 15, 2006.

December - 4 Figure Earnings was my roundup post for December. Not a post that i spent too much time or thought writing, since all i did was documenting my actions and the happenings in December. Written January 7, 2007.

The first post got one trackback, and still drives some visits a day. The second one however, already has 10 comments, and created a lot of buzz around my blog, which led into the highest number of visits per day to my blog at the time it was published.

You see, people are looking for the juice - the concrete, the undisputed facts, the action. While you may spend some time writing a nice post on how to make $2.2 million in one year, not supporting your words with your actions will eventually lead to losing your readers’ trust. And vice versa - reporting 2.2 million a month, proving it, and hitting publish is a lot of juice, but if you aren’t providing your reader with some tips and guiding tidbits, why should they care about you more than they care about Bill Gates?
“yourvalue”

Aspect #5: Your Value

You’ve got a killer design, your posts are well-written, yours words are robust, and you receive nicely printed checks from your advertisers each month, surely people will visit your blog now!

(Un)fortunately (depends how you look at it) - It’s true. People that are known names in the industry, whether because of their earnings, their words or their blog design will have sufficient amount of readers to make the average blogger blush without necessarily injecting value into any of their reader’s brain.

But what about me and you? all we have is a neatly modified theme, a caffeine dose and our passion to succeed. Sure, i made a good sum in December, but there are thousands, if not dozens of thousands that are making 4 figures from their online assets, so why would a reader possibly be interested in reading my personal journal? what is the #1 reason a typical reader would visit a relatively anonymous website that doesn’t have a killer design or belong to a dot com mogul?

Value.

If you are able to give your audience the kind of value that they want and can actually convert to benefit in fields they’re looking into improving, you will gain readership, you will be better-known, you will create a brand.

Let me base my point upon a stronger foundation: Why do you still buy expensive brand-products like Nike, HP & Gillette when you know there might be a better-cheaper product in the market? I know most people will answer that by saying “the brand has it’s own value“; Hence my argument that value leads to and eventually equals brand, and from that point it’s an everlasting cycle - Value creates brand, and brand adds to the value of your product, namely your blog.