WHAT MAKES
A GOOD BLOG?
We looked at our blog traffic over the past month. How many people actually visited, and were
there any patterns? Well yes, actually – there were!
- The bottom line is, you have to keep posting. If you don’t post, the visitors don’t visit. The more you post, the more they visit.
- Schedule your blogposts! You can schedule in Blogger and Wordpress. This helps take care of days when you know you won’t be around to post.
- Be sure to share your posts on Twitter, and use something like Bufferapp to schedule tweets too: http://bufferapp.com
- Take care with headings. Once you’ve uploaded your post, the hyperlink won’t change. So use catchy headings with words that Google can find; you can change the blogpost heading later if you need to.
- Always add keywords/tags. Try to make these consistent over time.
- Know your audience – what makes them tick?
- Know your product – we’re a library, so our main concern is to promote physical and electronic resources, not to mention our ever-helpful library staff!
- In a library context, e-resources attract interest. So does copyright, interesting new stock, musicians’ health, music competitions, creativity, learning and research skills, and employability.
- Weblinks are good. Readers want to know where they can find more.
- Don’t try to write a scholarly essay, and keep the blogposts a reasonable length.
- Have a conversational tone: expressions like “the musicologists amongst us” are not inclusive, and won’t really even attract the musicologists! You want readers to react with, “Hey, this is for me!”, and not “Oh, stuffy academics again”.
- Be the same age as your audience. No, that’s silly – obviously we’re kidding! Your audience could be any age. Students can be any age. Staff can be marginally older than students, or heading for retirement. You cannot be the same age as your audience, but you can try to ensure that your posts will appeal to as wide an audience as possible.
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