Successful bloggers have to keep their heads around many different aspects of the medium – but at it’s core is being able to write compelling and engaging content on a consistent basis over time.How you do this will vary from blogger to blogger to some extent as each blogger has their own style – however there are some basic principles of writing great blog content that might be worth keeping in mind.Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned on the topic over the years.
Successful bloggers have to keep their heads around many different aspects of the medium – but at it’s core is being able to write compelling and engaging content on a consistent basis over time.How you do this will vary from blogger to blogger to some extent as each blogger has their own style – however there are some basic principles of writing great blog content that might be worth keeping in mind.Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned on the topic over the years.
I’ve surveyed readers many times and this is the question that everyone asks for information on. As a result it’s been a major theme of my blogging here at ProBlogger with hundreds of posts written on the topic.
Just over a week ago I had the crazy idea to run a training day for bloggers while Chris Garrett was in Melbourne. It was a spur of the moment idea and as a result something that I thought would be quite small, informal and relaxed.
I posted about the idea and asked for expressions of interest and was flooded with enquiries. What I thought would be a 20 person event was starting to look like a 50 person one. In conjunction with the team at SitePoint I started to look at venues of that size but as the expressions of interest continued to come in we realised we needed to think bigger.
We have booked a venue – the Jika International – which will seat 100 comfortably (there is a chance we can upgrade to a larger room) and on Friday opened the doors to start selling tickets (via this page on EventBrite).
Constructing the sidebar was quite a feat. It took a fair amount of planning and testing to ensure the correct content was being displayed for the page you were looking at. The idea, was to show the most popular and recent posts for the blog you’re reading at the top of the sidebar, followed by most recent posts from the other blogs. This became complicated when we started adding additional pages to each faux blog, along with the posts they already contained.
Ever sat down at your computer to blog for an hour only to find that when you get to the end of that hour you’ve done anything BUT what you sat down to achieve?
If so – you’re not alone. This video talks through some of the distractions that bloggers face as well as my simple 3 point strategy for staying focused. It’s not rocket science but as bloggers we need to be reminded of this type of thing from time to time. Today I’m in the last stages of putting together a product launch and have been spending my day writing a sales letter for this particular e-book on my photograph blog and as happens when you have a deadline like this looming, it’s amazing the distractions that come your way. All day I’ve had little beeps go off on my computer as people have messaged me on Skype, I’ve had questions coming in on social media, my phone’s been ringing, I’ve had all kinds of ideas for things that I could do, new projects, posts that I could write videos that I could record, and it’s just been quite amazing to see all the things working against me. It’s almost like the world is conspiring to distract me from the task at hand. In reality it’s probably a fairly normal day in that way but I guess I’ve become much more aware of these distractions as I feel the pressure looming to get this task done.
We can also can be quite distracted by ideas. I am constantly distracted by ideas. Ideas for new projects, big projects, new blogs, new forums, new partnerships that you can start, new products that you can start. All these things are good but they can actually take us away from the thing that we need to do now, that number one thing right in front of us. So we can become distracted by ideas. We can become distracted by the tweaking, and it’s very easy to tweak a lot of things on your blog whether that be your design, your tool bar, even tweaking posts and headlines. Tweaking your SEO, testing different alternatives on your blog, putting up new idgets, new logos, all of these things, and again they’re all good things and it’s worthwhile tweaking and a lot of good can come from that but it also can be an incredible distraction, and one of the other things that I’m often distracted by is networking. Even now I just heard my Skype ping. Someone’s trying to interact with me and that could be really great interaction. The Twitter interactions that we have, Facebook, all of this networking can lead to great things but it can also distract us from those core things that we need to achieve today.
When inserting codes into the Blogger template, page element, or blog post, you may have seen error messages that the code could not be parsed, was not well-formed, was broken, or that the elements were not closed properly. These errors can be corrected if you understand the rules that must be adhered to in XHTML documents. Blogger templates use the XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type. In this article, we shall explain some of the XHTML syntax or rules, so that you may troubleshoot and resolve the problems if these error messages should occur.
