7 Insider tips to build an outstanding blog

Before knowing how to build an outstanding blog, you must first know what exactly makes a blog interesting and outstanding. The definition varies from one another but you can put yourself in the shoes of web surfer and list what would capture your interest on a blog and make you return to visit over and over again!

If you are stumped possibly due to yourself being a blogger instead of a blog-hopper far too long, here are some tips on how you can turn your blog into an outstanding one.

• Create a spicy title

  The first thing that readers would come across is the title.

  Give your blog post title a boring title and no one would even want to read your article. Give your posts titles like “The 1,001 things that went wrong” rather than “My bad day” and see your readers’ curiosity piqued.

  If you are keen to get even more traffic, make sure your title contains your keywords so that your blog post will have a better chance of appearing in the search engine when a search is done with the relevant keywords!

  Tips:
  Do not over-stuff your title with too many keywords until it doesn’t sound natural!

• KISS (Keep It Simple and Straightforward)

  Use words that are easy to understand and read. Don’t make your readers scratch their heads or use a dictionary to look up words from your blog that they don’t understand, because they never will and are more likely to leave your blog instead!

  Go straight to the point and don’t beat around the bush. Also, use layouts and themes that are easy on the eye and are easy to read. Post a picture or two or even a video, so that your articles aren’t just text, text and text. I must admit I hate to read a blog post which is full of text as this is really boring and uninteresting!

• Encourage participation

  By this, I don’t mean that you have to organize contests or create polls. In fact, simply ask for comments, feedback, thoughts and such will usually do the trick. Make your readers feel that their opinions are valuable to you; nurture an interactive blog.

  To help you manage the blog comments, you can use a blog commenting plugin such as the Subscribe to Comments plugin which emails your commenters on subsequent comments.

  Other more advanced commenting platforms which can turn your WordPress’ native comment system into a full fledged discussion board are Livefyre and Disqus. These two commenting platforms have cool feature that enables live conversations and collaboration beyond the blog on which they are installed!

  Tips:
  When people get the chance to voice and be heard, they are likely to return to say something!

• Take a risk in being different

  How would your blog stand out among the other millions on the World Wide Web? You would only garner attention and earn word-of-mouth by being different. To do this, you can either write in a different style from the rest or say things that others don’t or won’t say. But of course, tread carefully and beware not to step on anyone’s tail.

• Have a specialty and write in your niche

  Select a niche which you have the knowledge in to write about. And focus on the niche which you have chosen!

  If technology is your forte, do focus on your selected niche. Don’t write on gadgets today, cloud computing tomorrow and storage next week.

  Technology is such a vast field that there are many sub-topics you can write about. The same goes for fashion, education, hobbies and so on. Focus on your niche and write in-depth articles. By focusing on a niche, your readers will get the impression that you are the expert on the field instead of being a Jack of all trades.

  In my case, I always only write about web hosting and domain names and related topics on my blog 100Webhosting.com. I can publish unlimited number of articles on my niche without re-writing about the same stuff over and over again, so there is really no fear that I will have nothing to publish tomorrow!

• Help and educate

  Everyone out there wants something to gain from your blog. So if you are knowledgeable in your field and niche, share useful tips and articles with your readers.

  Create short articles with your tips or ideas in point form for easy reading, along with a compelling title. If you have a lot to share, split them into several articles to build anticipation for readers to want more and return!

• Build a reputation

  This step takes time but once you have a good reputation among bloggers and those in the field, the effort will be well worth it.

  A reputation can be built after all of the steps above have been carried out patiently over time. You can decide what you would like to be known for.

  You don’t really have to be the “knowledgeable one”; you can be known as the witty blogger, the one who knows everything and anything in the scene or just anything at all.

Building an outstanding blog doesn’t happen overnight, not even if you are an experienced blogger as you might not have been doing things the “right” way.

It is every blogger’s wish to have the most popular blog, so work towards that goal by putting into practice the seven insider tips above. These tips are based on my own experience blogging and building websites over the years. Hope they are useful to you!

Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below.

Image Credit:technobloggers