Craft A Blog You'll Be Proud Of
Posted on October 6, 2010I'm launching something new and exciting on sandcurves.com - and if you write a blog, it's going to be worth following along.
A new focus
I've been away and wanted a chance to focus this blog/website more.
Sandcurves.com is my personal website, and I would like to keep it that way. So I thought the best way to have a little focus for a while is to have a project - give myself a time period to cover one aspect of my interests, and perhaps "get it out of my system" so to speak.
[ Image by dm9312 | License ]
Time Period
I have decided that over the next 6 months I would work on my project as a series of blog posts and dig into the subject significantly. I've never done something like that before on a blog, so it is a bit of a trial run for me - the whole thing might be so boring to readers that I abandon early - or it could be a raging success. Who knows - let's see!
The Theme
My chosen theme for the next six months is "Crafting meaningful blogs". Do you wish to have a blog of substance, a blog that matters, a blog that is significant in your niche, significant to your followers? Do you want a blog that promotes a cause or makes you some money? Are you looking for popularity or perhaps just a voice? Do you want your blog to be meaningful - I do, and I'll explore the idea for the following six months on this blog. You can follow along as well (i.e. subscribe), if you like.
Background - why this theme
'Metablogging' is well covered, but I just wanted to share a little of what I know and have learned. I also want to take a less obvious stance - I think that most 'blogging' blogs are all about traffic and conversion - and I intend to cover that as well, but I want to talk more about making your blog matter - making your blog a website that your fans just love to visit - where visitors get that warm fuzzy feeling and just think "This is such a cool website".
I don't want to cover it from the position of being an expert - I'll certainly learn through exploring the idea, but if I was an expert - well, I probably wouldn't have chosen this theme and Sandcurves.com would have 1000 subscribers.
That said, I also don't know nothing. This isn't my first blog - I've been doing it for a while, with blogs like frantic-naturalist.blogspot.com (which still hangs around the 50 subscribers mark despite the fact that I have stopped blogging on it), and africanbushstories.blogspot.com (which continues to be loved). My business blog - see-namibia.com/blog does well the website itself holds it's visitors for an average of around three minutes.
I have also built other blogs that have disappeared in the meantime, trying different topics and formats. This blog itself has gone through some different stages - before rebuilding it with Python and Django. I have totally abandoned trying to work in PHP - but that is a story for another day.
So, I have something to contribute, I feel, and hopefully some of it will be interesting to you. Maybe it could change the way you blog, even change the way you think about blogging, in a meaningful and refreshing way.
I wanted to tackle a more mainstream topic than I had in the past - and see how it goes. In order to promote and build my other blogs the one thing that I have had to keep learning all the time is just this theme - making my blogs worthwhile. Sometimes I just plain failed at it, but all of it was a learning experience.
An Definition - well, sort of
My project will cover "Crafting a blog that matters", and that is about all I want to say in explanation. I don't really want to define what a "blog that matters" is - I'll do that along the way.
It may be easier to point out some blogs that don't matter - blog like the ones where the content is generated by third party apps that has nothing to do with the blog's subject. And blogs with no updated content for ages (I've got some of those, I know), and blogs with terrible design, blogs that are not promoted at all - that only you and your mother (mates, wife…) read.
Blogs plastered with ads that don't have much to do with the content of the blog and don't fit in with the design, blogs where ads take over the whole thing.
Blogs where the writing is so poor, reading it is painful.
Well, you get the picture - we want to talk about how to not only avoid that, but to be the opposite. You can have some ads, you may not write brilliantly, you may have only a few readers - but, for me, it comes down to one important question - does anyone really love reading your blog. Are your visitors happy to spend time there - does the time slip away when they visit?
Are a few of your visitors real fans of your blog?
In my next blog post I'll discuss my approach to this project and ways that you can follow along, learn from or even contribute to the project. If you known anyone who may be interested in Crafting a blog that matters, please pass it on. The more readers and contributors, the more meaningful the project will be.
The project will run until the end of March 2011 - and some time before that I'll start promoting the next direction I'll take for the blog - but for now, lets get stuck into building really awesome blogs.
