My Blog

Here at LoaTW I am please to announce that I am releasing my 1st guest post which comes from Niemand over at Revelations Zero. From this blog you can expect to see "A semi-personal and creative blog which I use to express my opinions about various worldly events and society in general," as Niemand puts it. If you like the post please head over and check it out.

If you're reading this, chances are you already know a great deal about maintaining a good blog. Or just writing well in general. You know the usual stuff: keep to a schedule, spell check, practice makes (almost) perfect. Keeping this in mind, I intend on giving you some advice which is a little less mainstream. How to get more visitors to your blog, and how to write content that is more enjoyable to read. Let's get this over with, shall we?

Controversial Topics
It's an unfortunate detail about the internet that adult content sells. And it sells well. But not a great number of us are willing to dirty our hands in the adult market. So do you want to know what sells almost as well? Controversy.

As a general rule, the more controversial the topic you're writing about, the more visitors you're going to get. It's not necessarily a pretty thing, you are going to get people mad. But the more people you get yelling obscenities at you the better off you are. A case in point is one particularly successful blog called Violent Acres. The author of said blog didn't care what people thought of her opinions and got rewarded for it. Perhaps her most rewarding endeavor was declaring war on “mommybloggers”. Not only did she receive praise and gather readers like she was some kind of prophet for her posts alone, but the same bloggers she wrote about then proceeded to write about her. You should all know how important backlinks are to a blog, and her enemies practically gave her free traffic!

People like controversy; it gives them something to argue about. Even the people who don't agree with you will read your blog, if only to pick apart your carefully constructed arguments. But traffic is traffic after all.

Get a Job or go to College
No, I'm not calling you a bum. Hell, even I don't have a job. But the fact is that by getting involved with the outside world you're going to learn a lot more than you could ever hope to learn from reading other blogs.

This has two bonuses, the whole “getting out there” bit. First bonus: If you run a personal blog, one not dedicated to any particular niche, you're going to get an enormous amount of stories to tell and topics to write about. From the things that you hate about your job, to that stuck up professor in your college. More ideas mean less chance of that evil scourge of the blogging world, writer's block.

The second bonus is rather simple. This second bonus works for all blogs, personal or otherwise. You'll learn. If you write a niche related blog you can absorb information from reading the news, working at your job, going to your lectures. If you write a personal blog, your writing will improve ever so slightly. You'll learn to express yourself in a more comfortable manner. Real world skills can transfer to cyberspace skills! Unfortunately it doesn't always work in the opposite direction. If it did I'd be some kind of super soldier at this point.

And my final point, which I cannot stress enough and is the one I stick rigidly to:

Write about something that INTERESTS you!
I'm targeting niche blogs mainly here. Knowing a lot about something does not mean you should write about it. I know a lot about Warhammer, and a lot about the Roman Empire. But I don't write about them. Why? Because I don't enjoy writing about them.
You might think that this doesn't matter. If you know a lot about something, and there's a market for it out there, you can make money from it, right? Wrong. If you don't have a passion for what you're writing about, it shows. Your posts will be of a lesser quality, you won't be as strict about sticking to your posting schedule and your readers will leave for someone who enjoys what they're doing.

It's probably not a huge problem, but I've seen it happen often enough that I feel it deserves a worthy mention. Do what you love, love what you do.

Interested in posting here? Well go ahead and fill out an app on Guest Post Page.

Pic taken from carolivia.org