This post is a stop along Tanya Peterson’s Blog Tour 2010. Tanya is the blogger behind Blogelina, where she writes about blogging your way to success. Be sure to check out all the other stops along the tour and enter to win $100 to use in improving your own blog!
Several of the traits on the following list of characteristics of highly effective blogs are
inter-related. You won’t be able to have one without having at least one of the others – so
consider them all important!
1. Good Community
They have a good community. Blogs are an excellent vehicle for interaction. An effective blog promotes community – interaction between the author and reader, and between reader and reader.
2. Engagement
Their owners are engaged. A blog cannot have a good community built around it
without the active participation and engagement of its owner.
3. Valuable Content
Content is king. I’m sure you’ve heard it before – and it’s true. Readers come to your blog because of your content. An effective blog is providing useful information in an understandable way for its audience.
4. Address Needs
They address a need (or needs). Basically, the valuable content the effective blog is
sharing is needed valuable content. You can write the best content in the world but if it is
about a subject of absolutely no relevance or interest to anyone else, you won’t have a lot
of readers.
5. Constantly Evolving
Like everything else in life, the blogging scene is constantly changing. An effective blog is constantly updating – as the owner tries one thing that might not work, he or she moves on to another thing to try.
6. Clear Purpose
How many times have you ended up at a blog or website only to be left wondering what in the world it is about? What’s the topic? Why should I be interested in reading this blog? Effective blogs will make it easy to determine what they’re about, otherwise people will move on to find something else to read.
7. Easy Navigation
Effective blogs take into consideration design. A really bad blog layout, one that isn’t pleasant to the eyes at all, can turn away readers – even if your content is really good. Who wants to spend a lot of time looking at something ugly?
8. Search Engine Optimized
Say the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” and a lot of bloggers will turn green. It can be a tough subject but it is an important one to learn at least something about. Search engines such as Google can be a huge source of traffic, as long as you’ve done some of the work to rank high enough for readers to find you. I have recently fallen in love with SEO Scribe (affiliate link). For bloggers, like me, who have a foggy idea of what SEO means but still need quite a bit of help, SEO Scribe is a must- have resource!
9. Easy to Follow
Successful blogs give their readers easy ways to keep up with new content. There are many ways to help readers get your updates these days – by email, RSS feed, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
10. Consistent
Readers have an idea of what to expect from effective blogs. They know about how often new posts will be written and they have an idea of what the subject of the posts will be. There is also consistency in the quality of the content – effective blogs provide content that you can expect to be good!
In your journeys around the blogosphere, what characteristics have you noticed that make up the blogs that are highly effective?
(photo by Frédéric DUPONT)
Tanya Peterson is a wife to a wonderful husband and a stay at home mom to my two little ones. She’s been blogging at Blogelina and learning about blogging since mid-2009. She is an entrepreneur at heart, always coming up with ideas and ways to “be my own boss”. She loves to share what I learn with others who, for whatever reason, also want to earn money outside of typical employment.