Monday, June 9, 2008

Making SOCIAL ISSUES a Useful Blog

Chris Garrett, a trustworthy source of blogging advice, offers very helpful tips about how to make a blog useful .

He notes that some readers will be regulars, while others will have come to the site through a link while searching for:

1. Specific information
2. A solution to a problem
3. News and commentary about current events
4. Ideas, concepts, tips, education
5. Further details of the information they have found
6. General information on the subject area

Keeping this in mind supplies us with a checklist of six types of useful posts.

Chris adds that to make the visitor happy, a blog post should:

1. Promise benefits in your titles and headlines and actually deliver on it.
2. Make your navigation suit the missions your readers are on.
3. On your homepage provide links for first time visitors who want to explore and long time visitors who read via the web and not RSS.
4. Individual articles should provide the content they promise, then provide links to more on the same subject.
5. Add clear signposts to all your best or most publication-defining "flagship" posts, while keeping your visitor on the scent of their hunt with series, related articles and category links.

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