Ideas for Bloggers: How to Maintain Fresh Content

One of the cardinal rules of blogging is to always have fresh content. But if you think you have already written everything there is to know about your chosen niche what topic can you still write about to ensure that your blog is always fresh.

Events – Write about events related to your chosen niche. If your blog is about photography, there are always photography events happening somewhere. You can write about photo exhibits, seminars, contest, trade shows, and photography field trips.

If you are maintaining a travel blog, you can write about travel seminars, exhibits, trade shows, and promos.

Reviews – You can write reviews. Again for photography blog you can write reviews about cameras, camera gears, and books. With a travel blog you can write reviews about travel destinations, gears, and books.

News – You can break news about your niche. You can write about certain laws that have been passed like the no visa requirement among Southeast Asian countries or certain issue that have recently cropped up.

Comment / Opinion – You can comment about what other bloggers are saying regarding your chosen niche.

Referrals – You can refer your readers to other blogs or websites which you think they may find useful or informative.

What Keeps Readers Returning to Blogs

I read a certain comment on one of the Philippine’s top blog. The person said that he could not figure out why that certain blog was considered the top blog when all the author do was brag about his gadgets, hist trips, and his blogs.

It made me question my own motives why do I keep coming back to certain blogs.

Big Brother is a popular show because it allows viewers to peek into a group of peoples lives. I guess it is the same with blogs. We keep coming back because we just want to find out what the authors are doing. Pretty much like the Big Brother show.

Secondly, certain authors are fond of posting very short entries. Sometimes I too question if they truly provide real value to their readers because the entries are so short that I barely got a hint on what the post was all about.

But, although the authors only provide very little information, and sometimes we would even see certain post as useless information, looking at it deeply we would discover that this style of blogging do offer us certain value.

Short posts taken collectively could give us an idea where our community/society is at.
It can reveal to us what’s in, what’s out, the general aspirations of people, our current issues, and our present concerns.

Just like with news programs, we keep returning to these blogs because we feel a need to know.

How to Prevent Blogger from Interpreting HTML Tags

If you qoute HTML tags in blogger it will get interpreted to its HTML counterpart.
One way to prevent it is to use escape characters.

Here is a good reference for escape characters: http://www.html-reference.com/Escape.htm

To Increase Traffic: Just Keep Posting

To Increase traffic flowing to your blog you should keep posting. Post several times a day if possible.

Most blogging software has a feature that automatically alerts blog directories across the internet. If you post several times a day, there is more chance that someone visiting these directories will notice and they might go to your blog.

Increasing Blog Traffic with Signature Link

A simple but powerful way to market your blog is by using a signature link. Every time you send an email or post on forums be sure to put a link of your blog URL after your signature.

An old post in the kubuntu forums that includes a signature has helped drive constant traffic to one of my blogs for several months already.