visnum

Are you concentrated enough to create original content for your blog or website? Creating original content is difficult, not because people aren’t creative enough but because people are bombarded with a standard perception. Many talented people set up a blog and then go research “big blogs” and look for what they do. This usually leads to procrastination and prolongs the process of a new, creative blog. People look at famous blogs and say “yes, I should look similar to them”.

This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.

I like visiting Technorati and look for what is hot. However, especially in the last couple of weeks, some bloggers abuse Technorati search results by both tagging their every single post with the most searched 15 topics in Technorati and using these as keywords in their posts. That makes it really difficult if something you really need to search is on Technorati’s popular searches list.

I am sure that the Technorati team is working on that and I hope they come up with a solution soon. A feature such as being able to vote for search results would be interesting and help build a cleaner better Technorati search.

So you want to have a blog. Start with choosing a topic and a blogging platform. If you intend to post on a personal blog, then it’s not of great importance of the topic and the publishing platform because personal blogs usually do not create massive amounts of traffic. But anyway, for such a personal nonprofit blog I suggest you WordPress.com which is a free blog hosting platform by the people of WordPress and Automattic and its free. Moreover, it has great features and it’s real fun. However, if you aim to start a blog in a certain topic, or a blog for earning money with adsense then there are points that you should take into consideration.

If I were you, I would prefer blogspot. Blogspot allows you to tweak the theme you use and you can also add scripts which enables certain features as some free statistics, adsense code, etc. Blogspot has a nice, good tutorial on its features.

If you have enough budget to host your own installation of a blogging or cms software, then I suggest you to consider using WordPress, seriously. WordPress is most probably the best publishing platform, especially for personal publishing on the net. By an enough budget, I mean something around $20 would do it.

If you intend to engage in problogging, you should choose a main topic and try to be consistent and coherent on that topic. If you want to earn money through your blog then that means you have to serve something to the public and in return you will either earn from advertising on your blog or commissioning from affiliate programs. So, in order to maintain a reasonable amount of traffic, you should pay attention to what you give your visitors as your content. This isn’t hard to achieve (not the traffic I mean, the content). Put your visitors’ shoes on and try to look for something on your blog. If you are at least moderately pleased with the results then you are on the right way.

There are plenty of success stories and how-to like articles on the net so make sure you check a couple of them.

By the way, what not to do is also crucially important. Don’t trust automated problogging software. This is a digital world and you will get caught as fast as the speed of the internet and you’ll surely lose credibility.

What I tell you here is just a mini start. Dive into your favorite search engine and you will find plenty of meaningful reading about blogging.