Wel­come to my new “How To Blog” series! In this series, I’ll try to put my knowl­edge to good use and shed some light on the basic of blog­ging. You will learn how to set up a self-hosted blog, what are the must-have plu­g­ins, how to attract read­ers, how to mon­e­tize your blog etc. I’ll pub­lish a new “How To Blog” post every Saturday.

Do you have a blog? Yes? Good. Cause I’m a pretty curi­ous woman (some would say it’s an euphemism…) and I love to browse blogs. Chances are that if you ever left a com­ment at my blog, ever sent me an email or just showed up here, I vis­ited you. I have plenty of feed in my RSS Reader and I’m pretty quick to click on the magic “sub­scribe” but­ton. But I’m human too — not all blogs attract me.

Basi­cally, there are three things that are likely to catch my eye when brows­ing the web for blogs:

• Some­thing original
• Some­thing easy to read
• Some­one friendly

Yes, I’m that picky.

But let’s be real­is­tic: there are thou­sands of blogs out there and not every­one can stand out. First les­son is, you have to be a lit­tle bit orig­i­nal.

• An inter­est­ing lay­out like Encore Seraphine, a funny view on the world like Mat­tress Police or Johnada is all you need. Just give me some­thing. I’m tired of see­ing the same Blogger/ Word­Press default tem­plate, barely cus­tomized. I’ll usu­ally pass on these blogs. Granted, not every­one is into Pho­to­shop and cod­ing. But you will need a per­sonal touch, whether it’s a cus­tomized header or a funny “about me”. And with hun­dreds of web­sites to help you tweak your blog, you don’t really have an excuse anymore.
• For some, keep­ing a min­i­mal­is­tic blog is a state­ment. Which works very well as long as they have some­thing to say. Look at Kung Fu Chewy: this bad boy didn’t cus­tomized his blog much (although he has the min­i­mum: a Pres­i­dent Bush “days left in office” count­down — don’t laugh, I have a Mozilla exten­sion on my browser for the same pur­pose!), but he writes well and always has funny sto­ries. Basi­cally, he has some­thing to say and in this case, his lay­out doesn’t mat­ter that much.

Les­son num­ber two is equally sim­ple: you have a writ­ten medium, please make it acces­si­ble.

• The font, for exam­ple. It seems some­what fash­ion­able to have a very dark back­ground and white font. It does look good. Until you tried to read and focus on the post for more than in a minute, which is about the time it takes to become cross-eyed and see white spots every­where. Granted, I don’t have the best eye­sight but I shouldn’t be able to read your blog with­out going blind. Period.
• Think I’m tough? Okay. I made that very same mis­take when I first started to blog. I used a white font on a dark blue back­ground (the one I now use as the blog’s wall­pa­per). A few peo­ple com­plained and I decided to add a post back­ground (light blue) with a dark font. Did won­ders. Now I’m not say­ing this white font/ dark back­ground never works, it does on some blog. I’m not talk­ing to you per­son­ally. But gen­er­ally speak­ing, try to think of your read­ers: who likes to focus like crazy when read­ing a post? Can you make you read­ers’ live eas­ier? If the answer is yes, just do it. Like­wise, mix­ing up font col­ors or font sizes in a post might look super­cool, but it might also makes it really hard to read. In a word: be nice to your readers!
• Oh, since we’re at it, one last thing: mind your &?%$ wid­gets! If you make my Fire­fox crash, I prob­a­bly won’t be back. Some blog take for­ever to load, thanks to a bunch of use­less things in the side­bar. Seri­ously, how many wid­gets can you fit in one side­bar ??? Don’t add up videos, pic­tures, stream etc. Think of those who have a slower com­puter. Like­wise, I don’t mind music on a blog. But I do mind be greeted by ACDC and not being able to stop it. Exam­ple of blogs which are artis­tic yet super friendly to read include Times Jour­nal, Video Store Blues or The Rain In Spain.

And finally, the third les­son: be a friendly blog­ger. Sounds obvi­ous, but some peo­ple behave in the blo­gos­phere the same way they behave when there is only one slice the choco­late cake left — they fight, they are impo­lite, they only think of themselves.

• Indeed, blog­ging is a two way thing. You need read­ers in the first place, so be nice to them. What’s being nice? Acknowl­edg­ing them when they com­ment, for exam­ple. You can either reply to their com­ments, visit their blog, drop a quick line… it only takes a minute. Once in a while, you can also “reward” blog you like by link­ing to them: in this post, I decided to illus­trate my points with some good blogs from my RSS feed. I’m sure the own­ers won’t mind! You can also orga­nize con­test, have a weekly “link love” post, a review once in a while… This is about acknowl­edg­ing you’re not the only one in the blo­gos­phere, that you enjoy other people’s work as well. One exam­ple of a friendly blog­ger who is good at net­work­ing is RennyBA’s Terella… check him out, you’ll see. This guy sent me a troll all the way from Nor­way a few months ago when I won his contest!
• The key is to share and exchange. If you only goal is to make tons of money or be famous, you’ll fail, because you can’t really do that alone. You need read­ers, you need sub­scribers, you need peo­ple to click on your ads. Remem­ber, the inter­net is a small world after all, so behave!
  

Mean­wile, I’ll see you guys next week for another “How To Blog” post!

Related arti­cles:

1. Blog­ger Vs. Word­Press (1÷10)
2. Must Have On Your Blog (5÷10)
3. Mak­ing Money With Your Blog (7÷10)
4. Blog­ging Eti­quette (10÷10)
5. The Best Plu­g­ins (2÷10)