Within the past few years there has been a surge in the number of blogs on the web, partly due to the abundance of free blog hosting services and their extreme ease of use. Now a single voice can influence the world in a way once only reserved for news conglomerates and multi-national corporations. However, these low barriers of entry into the blogosphere have resulted in an over saturation of poor quality and sometimes blatantly inaccurate blog posts. In response to this continuous exposure with substandard websites, blog readers have established an initial hesitancy to accept unfamiliar blogs.
Why would anyone want to read your blog?
If this question is difficult to thoroughly answer without much thinking, your hard work may be generating a significantly smaller reader following than you deserve. Your articles must benefit the reader in some way, in turn demonstrating your blog as a source of legitimate information. In other words, you provide value.
Takeaways… the key to providing value in articles
Depending on the theme or genre of your blog, your reader should always have an expanded knowledge and/or altered form of thought process on the topic after finishing the article (takeaways). This may be as simple as an interesting picture on a photography blog or as complex as explaining an advanced method to recalibrate a rear axle of a Jeep on an off-roading blog. Both examples leave the visitor satisfied that they have donated their time to look at your site.
To further illustrate the point, take a look back at this article. The intention is to benefit bloggers by giving advice on what makes a quality blog post, that’s it. You will find that there are absolutely no incoherent ramblings on a half a dozen different mundane subjects that would leave you wishing you had the past few minutes of your day back. If that were the case, I could already assume that you would never be back to read further articles. So before your next articles remember the key to building extreme value into your blog is to ensure that the reader will benefit from the post. Good luck!
