8 Blogging Tips For A Remarkable Website

Blogging tips? Sounds pretty boring.

With over 150 million blogs populating the Internet, you must make yours unique or competitors will smother you. While implementing blogging basics such as updating your blog at least twice weekly and writing on interesting topics can help get your blog started, they are no guarantee of success.

Even a blog that is kept current and relevant can fade into obscurity unless you do something to make it stand out from the very, very large crowd.

 Here are some blogging tips to your rescue:

1. Be Yourself

Bring your voice, your photo and your personality to your blog. Randomly click on a few blogs within the Blogger or WordPress.com platform. How many of them have a visible person behind the content? Not many.

By sharing yourself with your readers, you automatically rise high above those who choose to remain anonymous. This does not mean that you should write solely about yourself, however. Keep your content relevant to your readers.

It is important to identify the person behind the blog. Add your photo. Maybe a picture about your work area – basically add personal touch. Nothing fancy. You need not spend an arm and a leg to get yourself photographed. With modern technology it is easy to use a good camera and shoot a few shots yourself.

Though this seems to be one of the easy-to-follow blogging tips, you hardly see it in 1 out of 10 blogs. So this is one of the quick wins.

2. Flip Ideas Upside Down

Brian Clark of the highly successful website “Copyblogger” advises bloggers to “mentally abandon” the ways things are traditionally done. Think of how you can do things differently. For example, diet bloggers typically show before and after photos and provide healthy recipes. What if you followed the progress – or lack thereof — of individuals who eat radically unhealthy diets instead and conveyed your information from that standpoint?

This seems like one of the more difficult of the blogging tips, but it sure is an impact-ful one.

3. Develop High-Quality Content

Bloggers who frequent the bottom of the barrel tend to repost news articles and videos without adding a significant amount of new content. Average bloggers tend to write original material, but put only a moderate amount of effort into each post. A standout blogger, however, spends time creating quality content that he knows his audience will value. This may involve conducting interviews, taking a series of quality photos to illustrate a tutorial or conducting an extensive analysis of a movie or news topic in which your readers are interested.

4. Use High Quality Images

Pictures convey a lot. They are eye-catchy. So use images where possible. But again, plain images downloaded from the web might not convey exactly what you want to say. As I said before, it is quite easy to click pictures. You may want to give some special touch to the images to give them a professional look. Try your hands on some Photoshop actions to make your images stand out from the crowd.

5. Create Your Own Niche

Technology bloggers are a dime a dozen, but a knowledgeable tech blogger who can break down a complex topic and relay it to the reader by means of a comic strip is an outstanding communicator who is likely to quickly rise to the top. Have a recipe blog? Limit it to recipes that use blueberries, and you’ll gain a band of followers who adore the tiny blue fruit. You can always select a blogging theme for any niche that you choose.

6. Tweak Your Template

If you stick with one of the standard templates offered by WordPress, Blogger and similar platforms, your blog will blend in with thousands of other blogs using the same design. Learn the code to modify your template or hire a web designer to give your blog a brand-able look that reader will remember.

Once you’ve created a blog with a unique look, an interesting approach and unequalled content, keep blogging. Sticking with your blog will help it to stand out more than anything else you can do, since the majority of blogs are abandoned after only a few months or a year. Blogs that continue to deliver value to their readers year after year are special, and your perseverance can ensure that your blog stays in the game for the long-term.

7. Add a Winning Menu

You may want to differentiate yourself by adding a strikingly unique menu. While doing so, do not forget that the main intention for a menu is to provide a pleasant user experience. Your menu should be sufficiently unique to give that “wow” factor but at the same time navigability cannot be compromised. Lately grid menus and semi-circular menus are gaining popularity. Though text grids are more commonly used, image grids add the benefit of visuals for the visitor. The visitor immediately understands the menu item provided an apt image has been used. Semi-circular menus have newness about them apart from saving space. They are a visual treat for your customers.

Whatever type of menu you choose, remember most users are used to clicking on the logo button to access the homepage. So make sure you don’t play around with that convention. It is difficult for your visitor to relearn a convention, just for your website.

8. Use a font that is apt for your website.

This is one of the most useful blogging tips. Fonts can create or break a design. Most people do not think much about choosing a font. Either they go with a font that accompanies the theme that they use or use one of the commonly available free fonts. But in reality, each design needs a suitable complementary font. For e.g. if you are portraying a modern look for your website, a straight-face font might be apt. If you are displaying artistic products, a calligraphic font may give the required appeal. Apart from choosing the right font, you also need to take into factors like font size, color, italics and effects for these fonts. A good bet might be to change these from time to time and watch out for key metrics like user bounce rate and the average time spent by a user on your site.

If you are still with me, good luck for implementing these blogging tips.