Nowadays, there are a lot of blog sites, each of which have there own unique attributes and style. Blogging has become a new way of voicing personal opinions, as well as providing people with up to date news of their interest. They can vary from topics focusing on political aspects, current news, celebrity life style to a random person posting about there daily lives. Anyone can write a blog, after all how many of us had Xanga back in the day? It has the same concepts. However, there is a big difference between professionally written blogs and the little Xanga posts everyone used to write.
The most important aspect of blogging is the writer. The writer has to be able to capture the interest of the reader. More people will want to follow and stay up to date with the writers profile if the reading is interesting. “Humans of New York” is a perfect example of this, the way the authors just meets these random people in the city and posts about their life stories perfectly draw readers in. The idea behind this is very prosaic, however, this idea is also what made the site so successful.
It is also necessary to have a strong set of vocabulary, grammatical skills and to steer away from wording that’s too difficult to understand. Its unlikely that many people would follow a blogger who writes in Shakespearean to get his point across with anything. After all when you see,
“Wherefore out thou”
Compared to
“Where you at?”
Which would you rather read? Sean Michael Morris described that digital writing in a way should be “alive”; that writing should inspires action from how we perceive the wording. The best way for this to be done is by making the wording easy to understand.
Writers should be relatable to the reader, and Brian Carroll pointed out the importance of this relationship. My favorite writer is probably Paul Hudson and he writes for the site elitedaily.com. I have been following him for a while, and Paul focuses a lot on articles providing life lessons to better your self and live an exciting life. All of his articles aren’t only general statements, but his articles also give the reader insight into his own life experiences. All of which can provide the reader with a sense of empathy. Paul also posts articles about his life and the incredible stuff he has done. In the end you really do feel like he isn’t just another writer but that you know the guy.
Lastly, it’s important that every blog has a good layout. When people are touring new blog sites they want something flashy with pictures and not just a white background. The layout should interest the person exploring, so much that they want to tour the site even more. However, no layout should be that complex. The layout needs to be appealing to the reader’s eye, but the layout cannot be covered with a lot of ads and or be too difficult to navigate through.
I have always believed there should be an insignia that represents the site. People are drawn by images. This concept is a good way of brand naming a site without having to associate the site with the name. This is a similar concept to that of apple products, Twitter, Facebook, even back when MySpace was still popular. We never really saw the names spelled out instead we usually just saw the insignia associated by the brand. In my opinion I see an insignia as a strong way to gain familiarity.
These are just some of the ideas I plan to incorporate into my own blogs in the future.