One of the main differences between a blog and a static website is the way people are able to interact with your content. With a static site it’s just people reading words on a page. When you have a blog they can explore and even comment back! You want to get that sort of interactive spirit going so you can create a loyal readership with your blog.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy! There are literally millions of blogs out there all vying for the attention of your audience. It can be even harder to grab people’s attention when you’re just getting started. The bad news is that it’s going to take some work and dedication to build up a loyal readership. The good news is that it’s very possible, and even fun, to put these things into place. Follow these rules and you’ll have the kind of repeat visitors and fans that really make blogging worth your while.

Rule #1: Write Great Content

Let’s face it; if your content stinks there is no way people are going to come back and read again! They’ll just click away, never to return. If you write great content, however, you’re sure to get some fans. Not everyone considers themselves to be a good writer. That’s OK! No one expects you to have perfect grammar and spelling. It’s far more important that you write interesting content that stands out from the crowd. Give your real thoughts and opinions on things that matter to the audience.

When you write great content, not only will you have people who want to visit your blog all the time. They will also link to you! You know that more linking means higher rankings in Google. That’s definitely a great thing that will expand your readership base to levels you couldn’t even imagine when you got started.

Rule #2: Leave the Comments Open

It’s amazing — but there are bloggers out there who close their comments! While it can be a lot of work to try and get rid of those spam comments, you’re also missing out on a big part of what being a blogger is all about. You need to let the audience write back and speak their mind too. People don’t just want a website they can read anymore, they want one they can add their “2 cents” to. So, leave your comments open and listen to them. It doesn’t matter if people always agree with you or not (they won’t!), you’ll get a much larger and interested following.

Rule #3: Guest Blog

The chances are good that there are some blogs out there that are very well-liked by the people in your niche. These blogs probably get a lot of traffic and a lot of respect. It’s time to get your name and website out there in front of this audience! All you need to do is write to the owner and say that you’d like to write some guest posts. They will probably be more than happy to take a break from their own posting and to give you a link back to your blog. This will not only give you link juice for the search engines, you’ll also win some of their loyal readers who are interested in what you have to say.

Learning how to create a loyal readership with your blog is incredibly important if you want your blog to thrive. It’s all about the people, and making sure they are aware of your blog and love your content.

TrackBacks offer a unique way for you to know that other bloggers are aware of your work and are responding to it on their own blogs. The TrackBack is also one of the trickiest concepts for new bloggers to understand. Heck, even veteran bloggers haven’t necessarily untangled what a TrackBack is, thanks to overly technical and indecipherable explanations on the Web. The subject is a bit loopy (literally, as you’ll see), but I mean to illuminate TrackBacks with crystal clarity to every reader.

TrackBack basics

The meaning of TrackBacks can be encapsulated a few ways, because they mean different things to different people. I am listing a few descriptions here in case they prove useful to remember as you read through this section. If they don’t juice your brain right now, it’s not a problem. If you read steadily through the next few pages, you will understand TrackBacks perfectly. So, TrackBacks are;

• A way for two sites, each running a blog, to communicate with each other
• A form of remote commenting, allowing multiple bloggers to have a conversation spread out among their sites
• A way for one blogger to insert a link to his or her blog on another blog

You might not realize it until you get deeper into your blogging lifestyle, but bloggers spend an amazing amount of time tracking the influence of their blogging. That means attempting to locate other blogs citing their work and figuring out who is talking about them. Blogging isn’t only about writing; it’s about inducing other people to respond, either on one’s own blog or in another blog. The macrologue, the big blogging conversation encourages bloggers not only to participate but to hope for an influential role in that conversation and compete for it.

Let me be clear. It is mostly topical blogs that join the influence race. Their owners are serious about blogging, and they track their ripples on the blogosphere. Casual bloggers — diarists, families blogging together, teens blogging in social networks, and many other bloggers — don’t bother with techniques
of self-infatuation. Later in the chapter, I cover self-promotion, which is closely related to self-tracking. It’s all about attracting attention, for those with a taste for attention.

If your blog accepts comments (most blogs do), the comments you receive are the most direct indications that people are reading and responding to your stuff. Tending to your comments — reading them, responding to them as you feel moved to, and clearing out the irrelevant ones — occupies some
time in the blogging lifestyle. The degree to which you’re willing to attend to your comments can determine the extent to which your blog becomes a conversation forum and the style with which you write entries.

To a large degree, comments are solicited by bloggers who write in a conversational style or even directly request comments. The old “What do you think?” directed to the readership at large is a request (a somewhat desperate invitation, at that) for feedback. Some bloggers run polls and surveys to get some traffic flowing in the comments section. Well-known bloggers attract comments simply because people want to talk to them or because a comment that contains a link to the commentor’s blog is a promotional gambit.

The Weblog medium is a personal medium. Nearly all bloggers — even professional bloggers and corporate bloggers — write with some kind of a personal voice. Of course, diary-style blogs are all personality; their purpose is not to deliver news or comment on it. But even newsy blogs are often written in the first person when delivering commentary (“Greenspan’s predictions might turn out to be justified, but I think it’s more likely that somebody spiked his drink.”).

Those that maintain a more objective formality (no “I”) still offer opinion. Blogs are rarely purely journalistic efforts. Even stiff blogs publish entries that read more like opinion columns than newspaper articles. So, in the wide range of editorial attitudes from intimate to professionally opinionated, you must decide what your voice will be. This isn’t a time for angst; your best bet is to write naturally. Your blog should showcase the real you. That could mean writing in sentence fragments, stream-of-consciousness
rhapsodies, polished prose, verse, chatspeak, or whatever writing style you’d use in an e-mail to your best friend.

Your blog’s voice, or blog’s style, can be anything you like. Rosie O’Donnell writes in a unique verse shorthand. If you’re launching a topical blog, your selection of voice is also an editorial decision. Will you balance your entries toward objective filtering of news or your personal commentary? Will you link to stories about which you can be critical?

Is unabashed enthusiasm your style? Do you want to project an acerbic persona or a gentler voice that readers trust to recommend items of interest around the Web? Serious or funny? Deep or superficial?
One editorial attitude that particularly characterizes blogs is called snark. Snark can be sarcasm, ill temper, scathing criticism, cynicism, or any combination of grouchy attributes.

Snarky writing is like a badge of honor for many bloggers, but more than that it represents a certain know-it-all informality of the genre. An unrelentingly snarky voice can be tiresome, but you should feel that snark is always available when you feel strongly about something — especially when you feel strongly critical. The entire idea of “finding a voice” might not appeal to some readers. It’s a bit nebulous. If defining a personal style isn’t important to you, it’s not important, period. Your blog might develop a distinct tone over time, or you might start out effortlessly being exactly yourself (not the easiest trick in writing) and stay that way. Nothing in this section is a requirement.

To understand the fickle nature of blog readers, you must understand their information-soaked lifestyle. The most active blogosphere participants make a daily (or more frequent) circuit of their favored sources by one of three means:

• They visit and read blogs.
• They view blog feeds in newsreaders, looking at each feed separately.They use newsreaders that merge their feeds into one big feed that, when refreshed, shows the most recent posts from all the feeds.

The first option is the most prevalent. Even though feeds are becoming more popular, and I believe they will eventually be used by nearly everyone who reads online, most people at the time of this writing have no idea what they are. The third option, using a specialized newsreader that can merge feeds on command (such as Rojo), is rare indeed.

The point here is about ebbing and flowing readership. When readers take the trouble to visit your site, which consumes more time than receiving a feed of your site in a newsreader, they get discouraged if you haven’t posted any new entries since their last visit. Naturally, after coming up empty a few times, they might stop visiting. I don’t mean to imply that quantity is more important than quality, but a decent blog with few posts will have a smaller readership than a decent blog with many posts.

Volume brings in traffic. Keeping that traffic requires good quality and a steady pace. I know this principle — volume encouraging steady readership — is true from my own experience both as a blogger and as a consumer of blogs. In the latter case, my daily routine is all about slogging through more content than I can possibly absorb. I use two main newsreaders, each containing more than 200 feeds divided into more than a dozen folders. One folder contains the essentials: feeds from blogs and other information sources that I must read every day.

The feeds that make it into the elite group are the ones that I’ve learned, over time, always deliver fresh content. Those feeds also offer highquality content, but the constant flow of entries is essential.

The quest for readership, like the quest for topical currency, differs from one type of blog to another. Here again, personal diaries often don’t have readership ambitions equal to topical blogs. If you are writing for close friends and family, you can rely on your audience to check your space from time to time and delight in the occasional new entry. But if you’re writing for a broader readership of strangers who also follow other blogs in the same subject area, leaving holes in your posting schedule might cause your blog to drop off your audience’s radar.

Devoted blog readers like frequently updated content. As a general rule, if more than one weekday passes with no new entries, the blog risks losing momentum. If that seems harsh or exaggerated, you might be underestimating the voracious content appetite of blog addicts. Fortunately, some exceptions apply:

• Most bloggers dial back on the weekends, which are exempt from the news cycle. Conversely, casual personal interest bloggers might swing into high gear on the weekends after slacking during the week.
• Respected blogs have more leeway; their readers are willing to wait for posts because the content is worthwhile and influential.
• Customs be blasted, you can do whatever you want.

Casual hobby, fun escape from the offline world, convenient method of connecting with friends and family — many types of blogging never threaten to disrupt the basic patterns of daily life. But something about blogging, like keeping a diary, becomes important and seems to become alive. Some people know they want to blog seriously even before they start. Others are surprised by how much they love it as they get
involved. This chapter is about some of the issues that arise in daily, determined blogging.

Here’s the truth: Blogging is a grind. A joy, to be sure, but difficult to sustain over the long haul. Creating frequent entries can seem like a chore. Of course, nobody is putting a gun to your head. At least, I don’t suppose so; if somebody is putting a gun to your head, you have bigger troubles than deciding what to write about.

The pressure in blogging is the need to blog often and to keep the blog going over weeks and months. It’s easy enough to blog often for a short while (usually at the start), and it’s easy enough to blog infrequently for a long period. But putting the two together is harder than most people realize when they
are contemplating their first blog. There’s the imaginary gun to your head again: Nobody can force you to post entries every day or continue your blog for the rest of your life. But because the definition of a blog is a Web site that makes it easy for the owner to make frequent updates, the underlying point of most blogs is to write in them often. And to accumulate an historical archive of those writings. That’s two points. Oh, and to get readers; that’s three. Oh! And to keep those readers.

Installing sophisticated blog software in your own server space (leased from a Web hosting company) is the most cost-effective way to get full-throated blogging power over a long period. This method is also the most challenging way to start blogging. I don’t mean scratch-your-head challenging, I mean tear-your-hair-out challenging. Grown-men-weeping sort of challenge. Self-installation of a blog is like building an SUV.

Want to get started quickly? Of course you do. You’ve got a lot to blog about. Just keep in mind that with blog services, the quickest start usually delivers the fewest features. I suggest reading through the following sections to decide how steep a learning curve you’re willing to climb.

You can be blogging minutes from now. When my mother wanted to start a blog, I set her up in one of friendliest environments because I knew she didn’t want any hassle.

Blogging in Social Networks

Social networks are online community sites that link people together. Some amount of personal information is usually shared in an effort to present a profile that other members can get to know. This profile can be nudged along by questionnaires, or by making it easy to create lists of favorite things, or
just by providing space to type and upload stuff. Various community features are offered, such as photo sharing, instant messaging, and invitation-only circles of friends.

Blogging at these sites fits in with the overall tone of instant chumminess. Nearly always, blog content in social networking services is personal, like a diary. You see a lot of chit-chat blogging in these clubs. But the truth is that you can use any blog space for any purpose whatsoever. It is my informal observation
that serious topical blogging usually occurs in the pure-blog services that don’t offer all the communal, meet-and-greet features. Pure-blog services frequently offer a more sober, uncluttered, professional presentation of the blog.

Joining a social network is profoundly easy. Usually, you just fill in a Web form to establish a username and password combination. This registration form might gather some personal information for your profile or give you a chance to invite online friends to join you in membership.

Veteran blog readers notice that Weblogs have a characteristic appearance, beginning with the date headers, which indicate the blog’s chronology. Also, blog services provide a few templates used by thousands of sites, so many of those blogs resemble each other. These templates are page designs that
make the site attractive with no work on your part. Without templates, Web site designers spend hours, days, and weeks creating the content spaces and navigation sidebars that make up a typical Web page. With prebuilt templates, you just select a site design and start blogging.

Templates not only define the colors of your pages but sometimes also determine how your archives are presented, the format of your date and time stamp, and other details that affect your visitors’ experience. These details are sometimes configurable, and personalizing them is a worthwhile effort.
The existence of templates doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak, or even completely reimagine, the design of your blog.

Some blog platforms allow total personalization, but starting from scratch is challenging. Most beginners (and, really, all those who prefer creating content to creating design) prefer preconfigured design choices. And because many users of popular blog services don’t even bother exploring all the available template choices, the top designs are commonly used. As a result, most blogs created with WordPress, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger.com, and other services are instantly recognizable.

If you care about your site looking different from thousands of others, dig deep into the menu of templates. In many cases, the template can be changed in midstream; when you do that, every page of your blog is changed over to the new design.