the(new)mediaslut

Google Pagerank went “bonkers” recently by demoting or promoting certain blogs and some bloggers were making a big fuss out of it for fear it might affect their blog ad $$$.

It is true some online advertisers consider Pagerank as a criteria for advertising but a majority of them still see the number of eyeballs as a key to their selection of blogs to advertise in.

A high Google Pagerank helps bloggers get those “accidental” visitors who have googled certain keywords to hit your site.

You also want those regular readers and you want them to return to your blog.

So let’s get back to the basic of blogging and here are some ideas on how to get to it.

For a real estate agent it is about “location, location, location!” and for blogs, like any other medium, it is about “content, content, content!”.

Unless some alien life form is reading this entry, your human readers are creature of habit.

Try to have a regular entry every week. Yes, this blogger admits that the blog post here are rather random hence this regular BMT post on Mondays.

Its like watching TV. If you know Heros will be on Starworld on Wednesdays at 10pm, you will be seating in front of your TV on Wednesday at 10pm or be home early to catch an episode. (You can see the whole session on DVD, but this is an example, ok?)

In your regular post, write about the main focus of your blog.

If it is about posting about the media scene (both online and print), like what this blog is trying it damn hardest to do, then take advantage of it.

If your blog about life in general, summarise what you did the past week or what you are looking for during the coming week.

If it is about food, again, write a food post which can be a summary of what you found or what you expect to find in your next planned eatery venue.

By doing so, you create an expectation in the readers as they will be looking out for your blog the whole week to see if you have ate that eatery and the comments you have made about it.

Of course, the blog post that cried wolf will lose readers’ trust and their visits so if you didn’t visit the place as expected, be truthful about it.

If you find you have an entry that suits your regular column but you have to write it down immediately, use the Post Timestamp option in Wordpress, or other similar function in the rest, to post that entry the following week. By doing so, you already created something for that day and if you find yourself having a blogger’s blog, you needn’t worry much.

When creating that content, try to be a little more descriptive of the things you are going to post.

If it is about a dish, describe the taste, the texture, the presentation and even the service level of the place. I noticed that most food bloggers leave out the most important detail in their post which is how to get to the place.

Yes the address can be cut and paste, but it would help the reader if you could highlight the nearest MRT station or the bus you can take.

A photo or two helps with the post, but remember, if you can be more descriptive, it takes away your blogger’s block and makes it more interesting for the reader.

Online writing is different from writing for print which most of us have been taught in schools.

It is much more unpleasant to the eye to read off a screen than it is to write off paper.

What you can do to ease the reader’s pain to read a long post is to break up as many paragraphs as you can in your post, especially long ones.

The easiest rule is to make every sentence a paragraph. However, you can be flexible but putting more sentences to a paragraph, but leave it to a maximum of three.

To keep readers interested in your post, think of creative headlines to generate interests, especially if you are using blog aggregation sites like ping.sg.

The easiest route is to sex this and sex that, but are you getting the right readers?

Sex sells, but at what price and I will leave this for the post next week.

(See the hook to get you back next week?)

There is another trick to get your readers hooked to your post and to introduce a strong verb to your first sentence of your first paragraph as early as possible.

Remember the paragraphing trick I highlighted earlier, try this for your first paragraph.

Choose between one long sentence or one long sentence followed by a short one or have three short sentences for different entries. This helps to vary the pace of your posts and make it more lively.

Though I try not to add sub-headlines as it breaks the flow of reading, you can add one or two if you find problems trying to create that flow. But use it sparingly.

Though many of this blogger’s friend have complained about the Google Pagerank going up and down, this blog remained at a good solid five.

So far the only thing I have done is to install the All-in-One-SEO pack which can be found at Wordpress.org. What it does is that it helps to automatically generate metatags for each post which search engines can hook up easily.

At the end of it all, what you want is to bring readers to your blog so you have the eyeballs to attract advertisers. If you are not a SEO expert, generate content to generate interest. Some of the best blog sites out there have the lowest pagerank but  make the most money because they the readers advertisers want to target.

Have a happy blogging week ahead. If you have any questions or suggestion, please drop a comment.