The Blogger's Primer

For many, blogs are a part of life. You might keep your own blog or choose to visit several other blogs through your daily reading. You may even sit back and think, "Gee, I'd like to blog but I just don't think I'd be any good at it." This article aims to give you a good jumping-off point from which you can successfully launch yourself into the blogosphere.

A blog is not a technology, a technique, or a cool trick. A blog is form of content site; what's important is the information it presents, and the ways in which that content meets the readers' needs.

Burgeoning bloggers need to consider first the areas on which they'll blog, and which audience or reader the blog be suited to. The next consideration is to ensure that your blog can be easily found by readers, through search. The technology behind the blog, and the platform on which its based, is the final part of the equation.

Given such a content-centric order of priorities, this article will take a slightly unorthodox approach. First, we'll briefly explore the concept of the blogging: what it is, and why people do it. We'll then discuss readership, and how your blog content can be used to attract and retain a targeted readership. Once that's done, we'll look a little more closely at one of the key means of attracting readers: search. I'll explain a few of the techniques that can ensure your blog is crawled and indexed by the search engines. Lastly, we'll discuss the question of blogging platforms. There's a wide range of blog software on the market, but hopefully this discussion should help you choose a tool that suits your needs.

Why Blog?

Blogs are, very simply, "Web logs" that document, usually in a personable way, relevant occurrences, happenings and events, the way a personal journal might record occurrences in an individual's everyday life. The critical aspect of blogs is time: blogs tend to be updated frequently (perhaps every few days), and they often present content that is time-relevant.

Other than that, blogs are an open format. Around the Web, you'll find blogs that focus on just about every topic you can name. Some blogs -- Little Green Footballs or Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, for example -- consider political issues.

Chaplain Lewis and A Baghdad Dweller look at the war effort from different perspectives. Johnny Gulag and Root Prompt, like the SitePoint Blogs, bring Web development topics to the world. Other blogs are no more than the personal diaries of individuals. Basically, if you have an interest that can sustain frequent "reportage," then you might consider blogging about it!

Whatever the topic, certain universal principles apply to how blogs are most effectively implemented and managed. Let's consider those principles now.

Readership

To begin, let's look at one of the more abstract and intangible aspects of blogging: readership. What is it? How do we get it? Where do readers come from? These questions are important, as it's the readers that keep blogs alive.

"Readership" refers to the visitor-base of your blog: its audience. In this section, we'll consider readership from two angles. First, we'll see how your can attract readers to your blog; second, we'll discuss the ways in which you can retain those readers and encourage them to make repeat visits to your blog in the future.

Acquiring Readers

You have an interest, and, through your blog, you want to share your thoughts with all those people around the world who share that interest. But, how can you reach these interested people? What will prompt them to visit your blog?
Bloggers have at their fingertips a number of tools that can help them establish, and continue to build, a solid readership.

Word of Mouth

Most Americans, Canadians, Australians and Europeans now have access to the Internet. Many use the Web from home, but those who don't are often able to get Web access at work, through Internet cafes, and so on. This means that you can easily tell your friends, family and -- most importantly for blog growth -- other bloggers about your new blog. You'll be surprised how many people are interested in what you have to say, and would go out of their way to read your blog... if they only knew you wrote.

Other Blogs

One of the most effective ways to promote a blog, which costs no money at all, is to read other blogs. The blogosphere is literally filled with other people covering topics that are similar, or related, to yours. Find those blogs. Read them. Comment on their entries. Link to their stories. Contribute to them and they may contribute to you.

There's a key difference, however, between contributing to a blog and merely creating a message as a vehicle to link to your own blog. This may be a post to the effect of, "Hey, I wrote about this on my blog at www... Go see it!" Bad, bad, bad. Such posts are called comment spam; they're frowned upon, and are almost always weeded out by the blogger.

Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts among bloggers are those of trackbacks and pingbacks. Without getting too technical, trackbacks are a method by which one blog notifies another that it has referenced a post on that blog. Many blog entries will provide a "trackback URL" -- a specially formed URL that can be used by Blogger A to notify Blogger B that his or her post has been referenced on Blogger A's site. You would not use this URL to link visibly to a post on another blog, but, depending on the blogging platform you use, there may be a way to include trackback URLs in your entry.

Pingbacks are very similar to trackbacks, though they require no interaction from you. Not all blogging platforms support pingbacks. WordPress supports it, and Textpattern was working on something very close to it the last time I checked. Pingbacks can more easily be understood as a technique that allows the "auto-discovery" of blogs that have linked to yours without using trackback.

Consistent Content

One of the rules I use in linking to other blogs through my own "blogroll" (a sort of list of friendly or related blogs) is that those blogs have to be updated at least once every other week. This is minimal. Preferably, the bloggers I link to will post content every few days; ideally, they'll post every day. Everyone understands that people have lives outside of their blogs and sometimes may take vacations or lose the motivation to blog for a short time. But, on the most successful blogs, content is posted every day or every other day. This keeps things fresh. It makes readers want to come back every day to find out what you have to say today.

Of course, all of these techniques take time: they don't create success overnight. Successful bloggers are persistent. Developing a readership takes time. The truth is that no one will know about your blog until they are somehow made aware of it. The magic comes when people start finding out about your blog, bookmarking it, and coming to visit regularly.

The methods above will get visitors in the door, which is an important first step. But they won't keep readers coming back. Let's discuss reader retention now.

Retaining Readers

There is one thing, and one thing only, that will keep your readers interested: content.

Think about some of the sites that you visit every day. Why do you visit them? Maybe you visit CNN.com every day because you want to know what's going on in the world today. Perhaps you visit Yahoo! Fantasy Sports because you've started your own fantasy sports team. Or perhaps you stop at Fark for a daily laugh.

Whichever way you look at it, whatever the sites you visit, one thing is true: we visit sites that give us something in return for our time and effort. For this reason, it's important to provide good content regularly to keep your reader interested in coming back.

So what defines "interesting" content? What will hook your reader? Here are a few answers.

Current Entries

By "current entries" I mean entries that are relevant to today's issues. If you keep a tech blog, you will probably have poor results if you write about Windows '98. Very few people use Windows '98 -- or care about -- Windows '98 now. They care about Windows 2000 and XP. So perhaps your time and effort might be better spent focusing on those operating systems. If you like to write about politics, you probably won't get much in the way of readers if you talk about George Bush's (41) tax hike of 1993, though politics is a funny animal and you might just prove me wrong.

The bottom line is to keep your content focused on and relevant to life today.

Relevant Entries

This is similar to the first point, but with a twist. There are two kinds of bloggers: those who blog for themselves, and those who write for others. The first kind of blogger writes as an outlet for themselves; the second type tries to meet the readers' needs. The problem comes when the first type tries to be the second type and fails.

It takes time to establish a readership. If that's your ambition, great -- but walk before you run. Be prepared to put in the effort and be excellent in what you do as a small-time blogger. Focus on your readers -- address topics they want to read about, and make your posts relevant to their experiences -- and success will come in time.

Proper English

This is a pet peeve of mine: bloggers who like to write in camelcase ("I wEnT 2 ThE mAlL aNd HuNg OuT wItH Jj") and bloggers who don't have a firm grasp on the English language ("dat" is not a word. Neither is "holla").

Blogging is all about writing. Your writing may be the only way your readers may ever know you, so don't allow your writing to let you down. If the only thing your readers know about you is that your last blog post was uneducated, unplanned, directionless drivel, your reputation may be hurt for a long time.

Be Yourself

Sun Microsystems sums this up very well in its corporate blogging policy:

In other words, talking about yourself is okay! It's encouraged! But I don't want to know about your trip to the mall unless something about it impacts me -- be it a funny exchange or something you may have encountered that speaks to something in my life.

Superficially, blogging seems an easy thing to do. But it's a little more difficult (though it's not necessarily difficult) to blog well. Blogging takes effort and concentration. All the effort that you put into your blog will be transparent to the world outside. You may have the best design on the Web, created by a world-renowned designer who has provided all the eye-candy you can think of, but if the content isn't relevant, that design won't make a shred of difference. Your eye-candy might win a few click-throughs, but it's not going to keep them.