Quality and Uniqueness

There are many things you can do to produce content that really have no direct relationship to the quality of your blog, and you should consider pursuing them. However, nothing will turn a blog into a success like high quality content.
 

Good content creates a readership. Those repeat visitors can be the lifeblood of a successful blog. Additionally, other people who operate blogs notice good content and web sites and they will often link back to your quality posts. This creates a direct traffic stream from those links, as well as adding to your total cache of backlinks, which can help in search engine results.
 

People will come back to a site they know provides grade-A information or that touches them in some way. Humor sites that are not funny do not get repeat visitors. Sites about technological advances that contain inaccuracies do not develop a readership. Blogs that are littered with grammatical and spelling errors seldom generate massive traffic.
 

Effective writing is key to a successful blog. It is beyond the scope of this ebook to outline what makes a writer entertaining or informative. Most of us, fortunately, have an idea of what separates the good from the bad. Writing effectively may take more time and effort than simply spewing forth a few posts to your blog, but the end result is worth the extra energy.
 

In addition to writing well, you should strive to produce unique content that will distinguish your blog from others. This includes choosing topics that are interesting, opinions that are compelling, and doing whatever else is necessary to capture and hold a reader’s interest. You need to give people a reason to choose your blog over others in the same field. You must provide them with something they cannot get elsewhere.
 

This raises the subject of re-blogging. Re-blogging occurs when a blogger provides a synopsis of what someone else has written (perhaps even with an excerpt) and then adds a small amount of personal commentary. Re-blogging can be effective in two circumstances. If your blog is operating primarily as a news aggregator and a means of providing readers with an edited compendium of potential items of interest, it is a natural fit. Second, if your commentary somehow illuminates or provides an interesting twist to the original content it can also be effective. Too often, however, reblogging is nothing more than repetition of what could be found elsewhere and fails to impress readers.
 

Instead of relying upon re-blogging, a successful blogger will generally try to stay on top of his or her chosen field and will become the initial source of exciting information and opinion. It is fine to share the remarkable work of others--making sure that information gets out to everyone is one of the great things you can do with a blog--but it is even better if you can make yourself into a primary source of quality, unique content.