I spent some time researching best practices for blogging and found a few interesting key elements to creating a successful and powerful blog. Blogs should be “used to help establish authority through content that adds value to your industry as a whole” (moz.com, 2015). In this way, it should be professionally written and cause no harm to yourself or anyone who has relation to it. Content should be creative and bloggers should take pains to “think like their users” (moz.com, 2015). A blogger should take the time to post content that their readers really want to know about and avoid going off track. Timing is important to a blog, as how often new posts are made can impact readership. A blogger should also ensure to provide content that is engaging. This can be accomplished by adding links, photos and videos and other multimedia to make the blog more interesting to read. Blogs should also be fully functional and kept up-to-date. A viewer of online content hates to click on links that fail to work or videos that have been removed due to copyright issues. These are just a few of the best practices I found in my research that can lend themselves to creating a successful blog.
In this post, I thought it might be interesting to look back on a blog I created years ago for the purpose of analyzing it for these particular elements of successful blogging. I thought it also might be interesting to compare the elements of this blog, created years ago, with this blog that you are reading now. I created the blog “Di & Ang’s Excellent Adventure” (https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html) back in 2012 when my sister and myself took a cross country road trip in order to share our trip with our friends and relatives. I feel like many of the best practice elements I listed above were reasonably well accomplished in my old travel blog. I wrote this for a very particular audience, of which I knew every member besides those who might access the content publicly.
I believe I posted content that my readership was pretty interested in, and definitely didn’t post anything outside of the scope of our travel. I didn’t get into musings etc. about anything besides what we were doing or what we saw. Timing could have perhaps been a bit of an issue for this blog, in that as the trip carried on, I was less likely to post as often. This was a result of inaccessibility to internet and also just plain laziness. I believe that on this end, I may have slightly disappointed my audience. I think that this blog was engaging and did have a lot of pictures that were uploaded to make it more readable and less wordy. These pictures also gave the reader a true visual of the places we visited along the way. I do see my tendency to overwrite happening here, as I have in many other places in the past, which distracts from the content a bit as well. All in all, I would have scored myself a good 70% of the top possible blogosphere grade.
I’m seeing many of the very same elements of my previous blog in the WordPress blog you are reading now. I believe the content is quality, but perhaps a bit overwritten. I think there could be a lot more multimedia elements to the blog to make it more engaging to my readership. But, since this blog was created for the sole reason of completing coursework, I feel like the content must be limited as well. If I was writing for myself or my business, I would have to take into regard a different audience with varied desires on what they want to see here. Timing of posts would have to be treated the same way, and be based on audience wants and needs.
Blogging to me is pretty much free-range journalism. Bloggers are not held to the same code of conduct as professional journalists, which can have both a positive and negative effect on their work. Perhaps bloggers should be held to the same standards as publishers, but this may alter their content and make it less free form. If held to a blogging code of conduct, we may miss out on the function of blogging as a journalistic entity all to itself with no rules or obligations to the reader or writer. Perhaps if we all held ourselves in life, as well as in the blogosphere, to some MORAL code of ethics, the necessity of having individual ethics codes for each part of life would be rendered obsolete.
References:
Burton, B and Greenstein, L. (2011, August 28). Food blog code of ethics. Retrieved from https://foodethics.wordpress.com/
Fiorentino, D. (2012) Di and Ang’s excellent adventure blog. Retrieved from https://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/Di-and-Ang/page-2.html
Moz.com. (2015) The beginner’s guide to social media, blogging. Retrieved from https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/blogging
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