Setting Up A News Blog

One of the more interesting ideas for a blog is a news blog. It is a blog that reports news and comments on it. Visitors that have similar views as the blogger would probably enjoy visiting such a blog quite a lot. Here are some guidelines on creating a news blog:

Incorporate a “top news” column where you list the most important news. You should only list the most important news there. You should do that so that people who only have a minute or two can benefit from your site by checking out quickly what is currently happening. News should be presented in a very concise way here.

Use videos. You can embed videos using Google video or YouTube. Some news are best presented by showing a video, instead of just describing with words. Keep an eye on the most popular videos posted in YouTube, as very often you will find something interesting.

Have another section with detailed news. Remember, some people just have a minute to check out news, while others are looking forward to reading articles.

Finally you may want to have a section with gossip and rumors. This would be a good place to ask your visitors for their opinion, as by definition rumors mean that you do not only need to rely on facts.

Getting More People to Subscribe to Your RSS Feed

If you want to obtain a high number of RSS feed subscribers, you will need to focus on content. However, there are some other things that can help you increase the number of your RSS subscribers. A little bit of marketing might be necessary to make your blog well known in the blogosphere. This in turn will attract more RSS subscribers. Here is what else you can do to increase the number of your RSS subscribers:

1. Write compelling content so that visitors will want to subscribe. Before you start to promote your blog and look for ways to attract potential subscribers, it is a good idea to ask yourself a question: “If it was up to me, would I subscribe to my own RSS feed in order to read my articles?”
2. Promote your RSS feed while commenting on forums and attach it to your email signatures. Most forums have an option to do that. It is a good idea not to miss such opportunities, and try to market your blog wherever possible.
3. Make you RSS feed button easily accessible to your readers. Placing a button in the right place is the key to success. Use widely recognizable RSS buttons that most users are familiar with.

Even if you have a quite low number of subscribers, it does not have to mean that your blog does not have valuable content. It might simply mean that your blog did not get discovered yet by the blogosphere.

Marketing Your Blog to Your Readers

It seems that many blogs are actively promoting their blog, but often they make a mistake of promoting their blog to their readers. Keeping current readers interested in your site is important, but without new visitors arriving, such websites will eventually fail. What they should be doing is focus on marketing their blog to potential readers, instead of visitors who are already readers and subscribers. This does not mean that you cannot use various methods of promotion targeted at your current reader.

However, if your goal is to attract new visitors, then you have to market your blog in places from where your regular visitors usually do not come from. Writing a guest post on another blog, getting involved with social media sites, or commenting on other blogs are great ways to acquire new visitors. Try to be an active marketer and you should be able to acquire many readers if you put some work into it.

Generally, it is a good idea to have your marketing endeavors directed at places where there are people who could be interested in your blog. You want to market your blog to people who are interested in the niche your blog is in, so make sure that you visit appropriate websites.

Desirable Blog Niche

Some bloggers chose a niche that is the most promising when it comes to earning money. Others, chose a niche in which they are really interested in. If you choose a niche in which you are interested, there are going to be many advantages. Here is a short list:

• You will not have to do a lot of research. Since you are interested in the subject of your blog, there is a big chance that you already have knowledge to write many posts with little or no research.
• Higher productivity. Your expertise will make your work more valuable, since you know what you are doing. This will result in more work done in less time.
• Having more satisfaction. You will have more satisfaction doing what you like.

I think that it is clear that choosing a niche in which you have an interest is a good idea.

Removing Dates from Posts?

Do you want to remove dates from your posts? There are advantages and disadvantages of such decision. I have seen a few bloggers doing this, and this made me wonder what effects will such decision have on their blog.

Advantages include:
1. Your articles will not seem outdated.
2. Your article is more likely to be linked by others, as people in general like to link to something new, and your article might look like it is quite new, even though it is not.
3. You might get more comments as your articles will seem to be less outdated.

Here are some potential disadvantages:
1. Most readers might actually prefer to know when an article was released. Why make it a secret?
2. Not including dates does not change the order of articles. Those posted earlier might still seem to be outdated, even though there will be no date on them.
3. The whole idea is innovative, and might not be accepted well in the blogosphere. After all, hiding the article date is quite deceitful, and such a decision is usually not made to benefit visitors themselves.

I think that the biggest disadvantage is that not displaying dates along with posts will make many posts no longer useful. This is especially true in case of news posts, or those posts that were describing a situation that is likely to change. This includes the topics of politics, technology, and the Internet among others.

Email and Your Blog

As a blogger it is a good idea to have an email address that can be solely used for your blog, unless you have a contact form on your website, which enables your readers to contact you. Since having an email dedicated to your blog seems to have many advantages, it is a good idea to make sure that your email account is always reachable and that it has free space for incoming messages. You can make sure this happens by registering at such places like Gmail.

Gmail allows you to store over 6GB of data, which means that you never have to delete your emails. You can always access your messages, which gives Gmail an advantage over other free email accounts which unfortunately are quite often under maintenance. For me the most important thing is accessibility, so that is why I recommend Gmail.

However, I am sure there are also other reliable companies that might offer similar quality of services. Of course, they might not always be free like Gmail is. It is also not a secret that Gmail gained so much popularity, because it is backed up by one of the largest Internet giants: Google. Google has the financing and traffic to make such projects work.