what to write about

Moving on from the last article, What to write about can often be a challenge, reading other blogs and magazines is a great way to find ideas to write articles on.

The other thing to consider is the tone and position of your article, whilst if you are marketing and encouraging others to buy a product you will have a bias, you want to makes sure your article isn’t jsut marketing spiel, you want to be honest, open and frank, highlighting the strengths AND the weaknesses, and of course your own personal opinion, leave the marketing spiel to the maketeers and newspapers, give people a personal touch.

Try not to write too much, its hard to read on screen, and on that note, make sure you use a good font and your background colour doesn’t conflict.

Try and understand your read based and write to them, and their interests.

make sure you give a title thats fun, interesting and actually tells readers whats in the article.

How to write a decent blog article

First things first, by the the time you’ve gotten to this stage, you’ll probably have an idea what your site is about, and what topics you aim to cover as well as what your keywords are.

depending on your strategy there are two approaches, if your writing to constantly update the blog then you want to write more news related articles and about subjects and topics that are in the news, link bait and topics that encourage readers to see your site as a news point, like a magazine.

Alternatively you can take the approach where you setup the blog as a website, providing fixed information, in this instance you’re looking at writing articles that won’t change often, such as instructions or tutorials.

You want to build up a group of keywords for  the specific article you are writing, and for each article you want include those as well as the generic keywords for your site.

Keep the articales interesting and captivating,  and on topic. Add images and if your article is for affiliate marketing then naturally you want it to be encouraging and enticing with plenty of call to actions that readers can respond to. Finally, keep articles around 200- 300 words, anything beyond that is heavy going for the reader.

How to spread the word about your Blog

One of the toughest parts on Blogging is getting readers, first you want to make sure you write high quality content that easy and attractive to read, this will give your readers somthing to get their teeth into, be it stories, articles, reviews or diary entries.

Next, you want to spread the word, tell all your friends, get social network accounts and put the blog title in your profile, add it to your forum signatures,  and essentially keep adding links to your blog in places where people who might be interested in your blog will likly see the link.

finally you might want to try your hands at PPC, pay per click advertising, this will give you masses of readers very quickly, but does requre some monetary commitment and really isnt advisable if your just starting out.

How to structure a wordpress blog

Wordpress is amazingly flexible, the back end allows you to write and structure your blog with an amazing degree of ease, if you are using the self installed wordpress and your own domain (such as with Bloggers network), then the degree of freedom you have with structuring your blog is further increased, allowing you to create microsites, and structure these sites in a whole multitude of ways.First lets look at  the different variables:

In wordpress you have, four main variables you can use- posts, pages, categories, and blog roll.

Posts are time stamped and related to each individual article you publish, these can them be grouped in categories. Catagories work to group posts into sections making it ideal for classifying, you can add subgroups as well.  Pages act as permanent articles, lastly the blog roll acts a list of external links.

Obviously you can use all this anyway you like, however here is how i like to structure my wordpress blogs:

Post are for things I regularly update, reviews, news etc.

Catagories are subjects eg Game consoles, or Electronics, or DVD (posts are DVD titles)

Pages I use these for more permanent articles, features,  site information, Forums and so forth.

Blog roll, I use these for listing affiliate links or links to sponsors.

Having a good structure will greatly improve your users experience which mean they’ll more likely return and that will improve the chances of you marketing to your users.

How to make a wordpress blog SEO friendly

Found this interesting video about how to optimize wordpress for onsite SEO
one of the keythings i got was make it simple for the google bot to read, that Mr Google Bot to you and me.

keep posts in a single catagory will prevent duplicate content.