Blogging For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Creating Great Content

In This Chapter

• Discovering who your audience is

• Getting words onto your blog

• Negotiating comments and links

• Planning for dry spells

Lots of elements work together to make a blog work well, from a well‐designed layout to fancy technical widgets, but none of those things can substitute for good content aimed at the right audience. In fact, if you write well (or podcast or take photos) and you're reaching readers who are engaged by your style and content, you can actually be successful without spending any time at all on how your blog looks. Good content can even make your readers forgive an awkward interface or missing bells and whistles like RSS feeds or categories.

So if you do nothing else to make your blog succeed, focus on producing great writing, photos, audio, or videos. Know what your audience wants and deliver it.

In this chapter, you get some pointers on writing well for the Web, and for understanding what your audience expects from your blog.

Knowing Your Audience

First things first: How well do you know your audience? Are you hitting the right notes to attract the readers you want in the quantity you want them?

Not all bloggers care about the number of readers they get, but they do care about getting the right eyes on their words. Regardless of whether you're number‐obsessed or just focused on your niche, you need to understand your audience and what your readers are looking for.

You can get an idea about your audience by

• Looking at statistics software ...