It’s always good to be reminded once in a while particularly when we get so caught up in our blogging and forget the goals a bit.
Bloggers blog but bloggers also read other blogs. And bloggers tend to subscribe to too MANY blogs. It could stem from not wanting to miss out on anything important or earth-shattering. Or just plain ‘kiasu’ lah. Not wanting to miss out on any information.
But we often forget that we don’t have all the time in the world to read all the blogs we want. So we have to be selective and read ONLY the good ones.
After all, we need time for other important pursuits in life too. We can’t just spend all time in front of the PC (yes, we may be in the IT industry but we don’t encourage people to stay stuck in front of the PC all day).
So for 2008, it’s our resolution to remove ourselves and unsubscribe from blogs we don’t read.
On the flipside, if we’re bloggers, we want people to stick around and NOT unsubscribe. So how to make our blogs relevant and sticky?
Here are some blog-sticky tips according to Patrick Schaber.
Give readers something new. They should come away with a pleasure of having learnt something from your blog. Give them this pleasure! (This also means bloggers need to work harder to bring in quality content - content which needs to fulfill the aims of your blog.)
Post frequently. In my opinion, you should post frequently if you have good posts or information to share. If none, you can always blog about what you did and what you learnt because your readers can learn through what you learnt!
Maintain focus. This is a good one. It’s easy to stray from the topic of your blog because let’s face it, things get boring after a while. But do not give in to the temptation of wanting to write about other things. For instance, Krista’s soup blog focuses on Chinese soups only. Not Western soups. She says it’s tempting sometimes to talk about other types of soups but it’s also going to be detrimental to her blog readers.
Add visual interest. This is another good point. A lot of blog readers love photos and nothing speaks louder or better than photos. That’s why we use photos when we want to bring a point across. It’s best to make a photo or visual image relevant too.
Of course, it sums up to the fact that your blog must be useful. After all you are competing with a million trillion blogs out there. Treat your blog readers to something they can be happy with.
While on the subject of blogging, this year we want to give all our blog readers truly good stuff. If it isn’t good, we won’t put it here. More business tips, business ideas and lots of interesting stuff (we hope last year’s posts were interesting enough to draw you back again and again!). Also, lots of personality too.
Plus we’re upping the ante by including more book reviews especially business books we’ve read because I believe that we can learn so much from books, no matter how badly written some are. Yes, there are good books and there are also badly written books. Books which seem to have no substance at all.
We’d like to go the extent of putting up case studies (god knows we have a bunch of those waiting to be published and read) but sometimes, we have to be discreet.
We’d like to share more on web design and the creative process too because at the end of the day, it isn’t web design at all. A paradox? Not really. Web design is about communication. That’s the essence of web design really.
We’re actually very excited about this year because have we got plans in store.
Keep reading this blog and we’ll tell you more!
To success in 2008,
Nic
