Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to DevelopYour Business Online

Chapter 30. Some Tips to Fine-Tune Your Blog

Blogging can be something one does for personal reasons, and if that's you, feel free to disregard all that I'm about to share with you. If, however, you're hoping that your blog's message has an impact on the community that matters to you, here are some ideas for tuning up your blog.

Some of this information is technical in nature. Don't tune it out right away because of that. Take notes on the parts you want to pursue, and then, if you can't do it by yourself, put up a quick ad on Craigslist for someone to tweak your blog. It would probably cost no more than $100 to do this stuff.

SOME BASICS

With millions and millions of blogs to read, our aggregate attention is fractured by competing attractions. As a blogger, you want to capture your audience early, give them value, give them extras, and send them on their way with a means to refer back to you, should they wish. Here are some tips and ideas for that:

• Write really good titles. Copyblogger always has good ideas on this.^[135] A title that catches someone's attention, that is Google-friendly, or that describes things clearly will probably go a long way toward drawing people to your work. (By the way, this is technical, but set your titles in your blog posts to show the words of the post, not a page number or other weird random data. It helps Google, and that helps you.)

• Chunk up your paragraphs. If someone sees a big field of text, he or she will be less likely to dig in and read it. Try ...