With 2007 quickly coming to an end, many of us are once again making that obligatory list of new year’s resolutions. Lose weight, get organized, pay off those credit cards… all popular intentions that get recycled every year. But as you’re thinking about how to better yourself, you might want to also consider how to better your blog. Here’s 5 things that everyone should have on their blogging resolution list:

• Get organized. Organization doesn’t just apply to your office or kitchen cabinets. Its also a great thing to do for your blog. When you started that venture, you had an idea about the topic you’d cover but now, that topic has likely grown and morphed to include a variety of other subjects, related or otherwise. What might have started out as a few, strategically chosen categories has now become a long list of random topics to accommodate your ever-growing tag cloud. And on top of this muddled and disconnected structure are various widgets, banners and buttons designed to promote your content and advertise related affiliate products to your readers.

  In short, your blog needs a good spring cleaning.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that you get rid of your affiliate links, your widgets or even your unrelated categories. What I am suggesting is that you rethink the way you present your content as a whole. If your posts are cluttered by banner ads and bookmarking options, your content is probably suffering. Look at your blog from your readers’ point of view. Is it clean and streamlined or just a big jumbled mess? Can you easily find the content you’re looking for or are your posts lost in an array of similar categories and clouds?

  The longer you’ve been writing, the more likely you need to reorganize your blog. Clean it up, clean it out and give your readers what they’re looking for.

• Rethink Your Focus. While you’re busy organizing, now is a good time to rethink your overall goal. If, as suggested above, your topic has grown into something else, then you need to decide whether you’ll embrace it and incorporate it into your blog or get rid of it altogether. What you don’t want to do is have that new piece become an afterthought on your blog. Why?

  Let’s say you started out blogging about pet supplies and over the years, you’ve posted a few articles that include a little information on pet health. If you’re smart, you’ll use those tags and keywords in your promotion tactics but the truth is, your blog isn’t really about pet health - its just an afterthought that pops up once in a blue moon. Which brings us back to our two choices:

  Embrace this new, side-topic and devote as much energy and time as you do your original focus or get rid of it so that you don’t mislead your readers. Your blog can be about anything you want and even about as many things as you want but make sure what you’re advertising is what you’re really providing.

• Do You Write or Write Well? If content is king (and we all know that it is), it only makes sense that we’d want as much of it on our blog as possible. But there is a difference between writing and writing well. Writing consists of all that filler content, short posts linking to cool plugins and note-worthy reading elsewhere on the web. And this is all fine. Every blog should have some filler content to flesh out topics and provide useful resources to the readers in question. But unless your goal is to be a portal to other places on the web, you’ll also need to master the task of writing well.

  This means that you really dig into your topic. Don’t hold back - share your opinions and thoughts as if you were talking to your best friend. I remember reading an interview with a writer years and years ago, where she was asked what writing was really like. “You open up a vein,” she said. “And you bleed.” Sadly, I’ve forgotten who said that (if anyone knows I’ll be glad to give credit) but the meaning of her words stuck with me. You can’t just gloss over a topic and expect to be seen as an expert in your field. If you want the title, you’re going to have to be willing to bleed a little bit to get it.

  Yes, you might get a few spirited comments from readers who disagree with your thinking but isn’t that why you created the blog in the first place? That interaction is a sign that people are reading your work and considering that the average time spent on a site is about a minute or two, a few lively comments mean your readers are hanging around even if it just to disagree with you. Write what you think. Write what you feel. And the rest will just fall into place.

• Do something different. Think about your favorite sites for a moment… how long does it take you to decide there’s nothing new and move onto something else?

  One of the main reasons that so many people frequent the popular bookmarking sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon is that they’re updated almost every minute of every day. Granted, you can’t be quite this active on your blog - after all, you’re only one person, but you can change things up, offer new features and give your readers something to keep coming back for.

• Promote yourself. We spend a lot of time trying to promote our blogs but really what we’re after is some personal recognition. Don’t just look for ways to leave links to your blog all over the blogosphere - try posting some noteworthy comments instead. Yes, you can include the links in your signatures and posts, but make them worth reading. Offer advice, give an opinion, show people why you’re really the authority you say you are.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under Random Thoughts, Challenge Yourself, Money, Money, Money, Setting Goals, Personal Growth, Everything Cyber. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.