STARTING YOUR BLOG PART TWO

 

In our last post we talked about some basics on starting your blog, today we will continue on other things you need to make an impressive blog. 

Design elements

As mentioned above, you'll get to customize the appearance of your blog when you create it with a blog service. Most major blog services offer various themes, or templates, you can use to select the layout of your blog. Once you choose a template, you can further customize its appearance by choosing a new color scheme and organizing your posts into categories.

Making choices about your blog's appearance will be easier if you already have an idea about how you want your blog to look. Look at blogs that you find visually appealing. Ideally, these blogs should also have similar subject matter to your own—after all, a design that works for a political blog may look strange on a photoblog. However, this isn't essential. You can use any blogs you like as design inspiration.

Once you've found blogs whose design you like, the next step is to figure out what they have in common. You can then use those design elements in your own blog.

WRITING AND PROMOTING YOUR BLOG
Once you've gotten your blog set up and written a few posts, you can start thinking about attracting readers. While there's no single magic method that will guarantee more readers for your blog, there are a few things you can do to help people find your blog and encourage them to keep reading it.

Improving your blog's readability

The most essential step you can take to get more people to read your blog is to improve your writing. The best blogs feature writing that is engaging, distinctive, and easy to follow—in short, writing that is entertaining and highly readable.
Having a well-written readable blog doesn't require that each post be a masterpiece—it just means you should think before you post. There are a few simple things anyone can do to improve their blog writing, regardless of their skill level or past experience as a writer.

Keep posts fairly short

As a general rule, your blog posts should be fairly short—definitely under 1,000 words, though under 500 is even better. This doesn't mean that long posts are necessarily bad posts. After all, sometimes you need more space to tell a story or argue a point. Still, you shouldn't make your posts longer than they have to be.
If you find yourself writing a long post, take a moment to examine what you're writing and see if there's anything that you can cut. Not only will this help you make your posts shorter and easier to read, it can help you polish your writing by removing parts that don't add anything to your overall message.
Another way to cut the length of a post is to break it up into multiple posts. Writing a series of posts can be a good way to tell a complex story or address a topic at length.

Use paragraphs and images to break up text

Dividing your text into many paragraphs is one way to make your posts easier to read and follow. Readers who are put off or intimidated by a screen full of text are more likely to read posts when you use paragraph breaks. Adding images to your posts is another way to make them more appealing.

Consider using a conversational tone

Using a casual, conversational writing style can be an easy way to let your personality shine through. Casual writing isn't just for personal or funny blogs; blogs on serious subjects can be written in this tone, too.
Whatever style you use for your blog, make sure it's consistent. Your writing style includes things like your vocabulary, the type of humor you include, and typical sentence length. If these things change drastically from post to post, your readers may be confused.

TO BE CONTINUED...