Anatomy of an effective blog

In the first part of our series on marketing for digiscrappers, we talked about forums.

Marketing Your Digiscrapping Business: Forums

How Can I set up my own forum?

Blogs are another tool that many are using for marketing and simply expressing themselves. And in thinking about the topic I realized that there are a number of topics for us to cover. So these are topics that can look forward to!

• How to Choose blogging software & set it up
• How to help Google find your Blog
• RSS & Blog Readers
• How to find out if anyone is reading your blog or if others are talking about you on their blog
• Finding your voice

Before we talk about those topics I want you to think about what features make blogs effective? I have been driving Heidi crazy with my requests. Everytime I read about a feature or see one on someone else’s blog that I think is a good idea, I ask my sister to add it here. Have you noticed how our blog has evolved?

My wish list became so long that we decided to switch from a 2 column to a 3 column to accommodate it. This change in style about a month ago took Heidi hours to do. But we’re pleased with the results and in using some free web applications we’re able to see those statistics & know that it’s effective. So join me in a tour of our blog & it’s features & then at the end I’ll give you some examples of 2 column blogs. Then you can go home to your blog & tweak it (or ask your webmaster to do it).

In left column:

• photos of us (well they were there - is it better to have them there or no? that is the question?)
• about us information (a bit more information about who we are)
• contact us (so people can ask questions or send comments by email)
• links to other areas of the site (so important to connect people to the whole place)
• Search box to find information in previous blog posts
• Recent posts
• Archived posts

In right column: (and these are here because this is the most prominent location)

• Place to subscribe to receive blog by email
• Subscribe by RSS feed or blog reader
• Category tag cloud is clickable & allows user to search blog posts by topic (try it & click on one!) The largest words have the most entries.
• Blogroll of links to other blogs

After each blog entry:

• Link to Email the blog entry to someone else (this encourages spreading your blog information)
• Subscribe to the blog by email (another opportunity to in case they missed the top right corner)
• A number of Social Bookmarking Lists so the reader can easily add the blog entry to their list for future reference.
• Comment area

If you’d like to see an example of a great 2 column blog, check out Angie Pedersen’s Scrapbooking Industry News. To be honest, many items on my blog must-have list have come from her’s. She also has another blog that I read, Scrapbook Marketing.com That’s also a 2 column blog.

My suggestion is to look at blogs when you’re reading them & consider what features you like and which ones you think are helpful. Then go back home & implement them. Much of it can be done yourself & for free. Everything that we have here is free with the exception of the site that hosts it. Stay tuned & we’ll take you behind the scenes of this blog.

Do you have questions about blogs or blogging? Please ask & we’ll try to answer them

Subscribe to the comments for this post