A lot of things have been going through my mind lately. With the bit of feedback I’ve been getting for saying goodbye to Blog Explosion, I’ve been pondering what I am doing here to make my blog bring back visitors. What are the things I need to do to bring visitors back to my site? How can I make my site interesting? These have all been floating around inside my head.
What are the things I need to do to bring visitors back to my site? Obviously, the answer to this would be to create good, interesting content. Content that would appeal to the general audience. You can’t please everyone, but you want to try to please the majority.
If you wanted to talk about your life, that is OK too. This can be interesting content. If you don’t think your life is interesting enough to be construed as “entertaining”, I think you need to look again at the boob tube, and tell me, how many things on TV are based on “real life”. You can’t get enough of it! Reality TV is the thing nowadays. Human drama is entertainment.
Your life is not boring. Not only is it not boring, you probably don’t realize just how many people in the world are going through similar events in their lives. I’m not saying they’re the same. I’m saying they’re similar. The circumstances are different, but the premise is the same. You’re not alone in this world.
But how do you make it “entertaining?” That’s the real question, right? How can you come up with content every day that will bring back the masses?
Well, first of all, and here’s where Blog Explosion (and sites like them) come in. You have to read other people’s blogs. If not for the sake of getting your own entertainment, for the sake of learning how to write better, and what to write about. Since I’m a firm believer in learning by example, I strongly encourage this. Finding new sites, and making new friends is very important to the flow of your mind. Otherwise, you’ll be blogging out of a box which consists of your own world, and well, who else is in your world then, if you’re in a box? You need to get out of the box once in a while and experience other people’s lives, and you can do that by visiting other people’s sites.
Second of all, and this was stressed in this article by Karen, writing well, makes an impression on readers. If you consistently make errors, and misspell (or misuse) words, then people are going to be less likely to come back to visit you. Seriously. Depending on the audience that you want to attract, you might consider changing your style of writing too. Think about this way. If you’re looking to attract the “l33t” crowd, then you will probably talk in that “elite” language of hacker speak or whatever it might be called. Of course, dinosaurs like me will never understand that language, and the only “shorthand” I use regularly is: “cuz”. So read over the article at Karen’s, because it’s good and Totally true.
Oh, another important thing. No one expects you (or should at least) to write the ground-breaking blog entry every day. That’s just not realistic. Not everyone is a pulitzer prize winning writer. And no one should ever be expected to be. Anyone who has expectations like that must get let down a lot, and that’s sad.
Yoshi doesn’t like mondays. He thinks that should be enough.
