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Posted by John Lockwood on April 11th, 2008

What does having a better blog mean to you? Does it mean a big four or five-digit subscriber count? How about a steady stream of people who start commenting on your posts almost as soon as they hit your site? Do you want more page views because more page views means more advertising revenue, or are you content with capturing a smaller, focused niche in the search engines to help you sell your product or service? Do you want to convert more of your visitors to closed sales, or are you simply trying to reach a larger audience with your message?

Whatever your exact goals, I want to welcome you to this new article series, Twenty-One Days to a Better Blog.

Today is day one. That means of course that we’ll have twenty more posts in the series. However, by way of warning up front, I may take a day or two off as we go along, especially on weekends. Also, I may write a post from time to time that’s not part of the series. All in all, however, I think you’ll find that navigating around in the series will be pretty easy. (In fact, if you’re curious, I’ll share with you how to set up such a series when we get to the day entitled “Write an Article Series”.)

We’ll also be writing about a number of different things you can try on your blog. Some of these you may only need to do once, and they may take you a lot less time than a day. So don’t be surprised if you still have to write your blog and work on some of these after the twenty-one days are up. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to structure this in such a way that if you try out the suggestions I write about, your blog should be better at the end of twenty-one days than it was at the beginning, and so that you can continue to improve from there.

What Do We Mean By “Better?”

I asked you the questions above about what you think a better blog is, and now it’s fair at the outset of the series that I share with you a little bit about my background, what I mean by a “better” blog, and where I intend to end up. Also I want to lay out some of the territory we’ll be exploring so you have a way to think about the rest of the posts in the series.

Let’s start with the background first. For many years now, I’ve been blogging in a small niche (real estate in the Sacramento area). In fact, I was the founder and am still the co-author of the oldest real estate blog in Sacramento. In that blog, I haven’t focused much on building my subscriber audience, since most people care about real estate when they’re about to buy or sell a house, and the subset of those who care about a particular geographical area is fairly small. Because of this, my focus was on reaching people when they were searching for real estate, and having a following was less important to me.

In contrast, when I started Inklit, I realized that the topic of “Internet Writing” had a much larger potential audience, so building a subscriber base was one of the first things I wrote about. And sure enough, this month-old blog already has more than half the subscribers of my almost five-year-old real estate blog.

The reason I bring this up is that I’m going to give a definition of better, but I want to stress at the outset that not every blogger is the same — and even for a single blogger, the definition is going to vary according to what project you’re working on. So as you stay cooped up with me for the next twenty days, I want you to be thinking about how — and whether — this definition applies to you. The other reason I bring this up is to set the tone as fellow traveler on this journey with you — in fact, as often as possible, I’ll be demonstrating the techniques I’ll be writing about here so you can get an idea of what I mean.

A Blog is Better If…

1. It makes more money. Feel free to ignore this if your blog is strictly personal and you don’t care about making money. If you do care about making money, then more is generally considered a better quantity of money than less. (Check with a Harvard MBA on that, but I’m pretty sure).
2. It is clear. I recently wrote about the debate between the specialists and generalists, and in that post, I argued that the specialists won. People like to subscribe to resources that they think will educate or entertain them in a certain way. So having unity of theme is one way for a blog to be clear. Other elements of clarity include a clean and easy to understand layout, simple navigation elements, and outstanding writing. In the case of elements that will lead a visitor to buy from you, ease of ordering also feeds back into item 1, making more money. The same is true for other things you might want a visitor to do, like subscribing. See the next point.
3. It has more readers. Even if you don’t care about how much money you make, you still want someone to read you — otherwise your haikus or whatever would be in a notebook in your desk. If you do care about making money, then, depending on your business model, you may need a lot of people reading you to make any money at all. Even the most jaded SEO practitioner — more concerned with how computers view their writing than people how people do — want readers because readers might link to them! We can measure readers in a number of ways, unique visitors, page views, subscriber counts, etc.

How Are We Going To Get There?

As I look over the list of topics we’ll be digging into, it occurs to me that they fall into two broad groups or categories, the “me, myself, and my keyboard” group, and the “get by with a little help from my friends” group. That is to say, there are tasks you could in principle do all by yourself (though for some people who are less technical, some of the technical tasks may require some help from your web guy). Then there are tasks which by their nature mean you need others to help you, so we’re going to be learning about building a sphere of influence and social networking. You can think of this as “writing” or “development” tasks versus “marketing” or “promotion” tasks. There are some tasks, though, that straddle both worlds, where community and content come together.

If you think about it, our definition of a “better” blog breaks down the same way. You can make your blog more clear, and it will be clear whether you read it or a million people do. But you can’t get to a million readers or a million dollars without the involvement of other people.

Join Us For The Rest Of The Series

If you’re not already a subscriber, I would like to invite you to subscribe to this blog (in a reader or by email) too get the whole series as it comes out.

Also, if you enjoy the series, please do me a favor and give it some consideration in your favorite social networking / social bookmarking applications using the “Share This” button.

Twenty-One Days To a Better Blog Table of Contents