Welcome to the second part in my series of blogging lessons – I’m not claiming to be an expert or anything but I’m going to go ahead and air my views on what makes a great blog. This information comes directly from the amount of things that annoy me when reading other blogs – and everything that annoys me is another thing that will make me want to go ahead and click that unsubscribe button!

photo credit: Peregrino Will Reign

Ok, so now that you’ve got an online identity the next thing you need is some great content…

Lesson Two: Great Content

• I’m not going to want to read your blog if I can’t find your posts, and similarly I’m not going to want to comment if I can’t find the form! Try to avoid too much clutter and badly placed ads to create a clean, easily accessible website. Posts should be obvious and the easier it is to comment, the more likely people are to do so.
• Please, I am begging you, do not have all your text centered. It might look pretty, but it’s seriously difficult to read. Go for either align left (jagged right) or justified, and go easy on your readers. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve stopped reading a blog post because they’ve put every sentence on a new line, and centred it all. It’s just too much of a pain in the arse to try to read! Even if your content is great, if you make it difficult to read then no one is going to.
• Try to keep your font readable. Again, if you can’t read it easily, then other people aren’t going to bother! A light font or a super small one both cause problems. Keep in mind that just because you can read your posts on your monitor with your 20:20 vision, other people might not be able to. Display contrast settings and brightnesses range wildly from one to another, and so what is legible on one may be almost impossible to read on another.
• Use good english. Try to avoid ‘txt spk’, use full words instead. Make use of a spell checker – there is an excellent free plugin called After the Deadline that comes as either a firefox or chrome extension, or as a WordPress plugin. It is easy to use and might save you from making an embarrassing mistake in your posts! I do not like reading blogs full of really obvious spelling mistakes and awful grammar, and so I just don’t read them. This one really drives me bonkers, especially as it’s so easy just to press a spellcheck button and fix things! If you want people to take you seriously, good english is important. Trust me.
• When you’re thinking of things to post about, try to keep it varied. Don’t write about what every other person out there is blogging about, if you can help it. If you do, then make sure that your post is unique and not just a carbon copy of all those others you’ve read! If you have an interesting idea for a blog post, jot it down to explore later. This will help keep your content fresh and interesting. Blogs full of the same type of post over and over are boring!

Next up – RSS feeds. What they are and how to provide a good one!

Over the past few years I have accumulated quite a long list of blogs that I read regularly (and in some cases religiously!) or at least visit now and again. As such, I have a mental list of common errors I see happening in the blogosphere. Most of these problems are irritating or off putting to the reader, and some of them are actually annoying to the extent that I tend to unsubscribe to blogs entirely.

Being the kind and generous person that I am, I’ve decided to share these mistakes/tips with the internet, so hopefully it will help a few people and make the internet a slightly less annoying place to be.

Lesson One: Establishing Your Online ‘Brand’

• Pick a name that is memorable and unique. It doesn’t have to be particularly poetic or pretty, as long as there aren’t a hundred other blogs out there with similar names. In my opinion just using your name or something similar is fine, if it is fairly unique. After all, how are readers going to remember just which blog it was they found the other day, if they google the name and are presented with pages and pages of results – all blogs that have the same title?
• Avoid naming your blog after something trendy. The number of blogs out there right now with cupcakes in the name?… When the fad passes (and I get the feeling it’s on its way out already), then those blogs will seem out of date. An on-trend name now means that it will look dated in the future. Go for something that doesn’t rely on the fickleness of trends instead, otherwise you will end up having to rename your blog constantly, and that will just lead to confusion for your readers.
• When choosing your blog name, try to avoid naming it after your current situation in life. “The unemployed graduate” is going to seem a bit weird in 5 years when you’ve had a career for a while and your university years are so far behind you.

Favicon, Gravatar & Apple icon

• If you don’t have a favicon on your blog, add one. Favicons are small 16×16 pixel icons that represent your website. These tiny pics are displayed next to your blog name in RSS readers and bookmarks, so if you have a memorable or eye-catching favicon then your blog will stand out amongst the hundreds of generic blogger/wordpress icons.
  • Add a custom favicon to your blogger blog
  • Upload a ‘Blavatar’ to your wordpress.com blog (the blavatar is then set as your favicon)
  • How to add a favicon to your wordpress blog (self hosted)
  • Adding a Personalised Icon to your (Typepad) Webblog
  • Add a Favicon (to a Moveable Type blog)
• As well as ensuring that your blog has an icon, you should make sure that you do too. There is a widely used service called Gravatar, or Globally Recognised Avatar, which associates a small photo or avatar with your email address. When you comment on other blogs around the net, you will find your photo appearing next to your comments like magic! A gravatar combined with a matching favicon is great – it establishes a consistent brand identity. People will see that icon and think of you, and your blog. If there are 5 people all called Sarah, and your comments have a distinct brand via the gravatar next to them, then readers and blog owners will be able to immediately associate your comment with you & your blog.
  • Upload a gravatar using wordpress.com
  • Information about gravatars (including a handy overview video
• If you want to go all out with your icon branding, then you should add an ‘apple-touch-icon‘ which shows up when people bookmark your site on their iPhone/iPod/iPad homescreens. A good size to make this is 150 x 150 pixels, as each device will scale it down as necessary for their respective screen. A nice touch with this is that apps are starting to use these icons to represent the website, as with Reeder for iPad.
  • Creating a webpage icon for iPad or iPhone
• You could also set your twitter icon to your ‘universal icon’ if you want to go all out, though I tend not to do this, and just have a recent photo instead.

Lesson Two in a few days.. all about RSS feeds and what not to do with yours!