Professional Blogging For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Developing Your Blog Content

In This Chapter

• Finishing up your strategy

• Defining your blog's voice

• Developing an editorial calendar

• Constructing a blogroll

• Preparing your policies

• Getting noticed

In Part I, you discover how to sketch a preliminary plan (see Chapter 1) and an editorial mission (see Chapter 2) for your blog. Part II covers monetization options so you can plan your blog design to accommodate the right advertising choices for your business. Finally, in the first two chapters of Part III, you explore the technical nuts and bolts of blog design and development.

Now you're ready to write. Almost. First, you have to put the final touches on your strategy. After all, the best-designed and positioned blog is ineffective unless the content meets the readers' needs. Readers appreciate your efforts to make the blog look good and function well, but they come to read what you have to say about your topic and then discuss it with you — in your comments, on social networks, and on their own blogs. Good blog content tells your story in a compelling, interesting way, and that's what gets the conversation started.

In this chapter, I help you complete your blog by offering you a framework for developing and presenting your blog's content. I go over finding your voice (the subtleties of presentation that distinguish your writing), developing an editorial calendar for your blog, building a blogroll (a list of recommended blogs that you promote on your site), setting a commenting policy, ...