In Other Words

Blogging Gimmicks

Lets talk about gimmicks.  I haven’t spoken about gimmicks in a couple of days, so today is another good day to talk about it.  Ok, spent a bit of time looking at pages and this is what I’ve come up with so far:

1. People like pretty.
If there is a definite thing that seems to help people out it’s that a pretty page keeps people in longer.  Run of the mill pages that use standard templates have trouble keeping people in.  The trick is getting people to read.  If you can’t even get people to seriously read any of your page then it doesn’t matter how interesting your writing is.

2. We likes what we knows
Stuff that talks about stuff we are interested in always helps.  So blogs about movies, politics, movie stars or goat dung will generally do better then blogs about, uhrm, well, stuff that people are less interested in.  (use general interest words to appear on google)

3. Tell us a story!
Continuity, flow and a clear time line seem to be appreciated by many.  The slow progression of time and the twists and turns of daily life interest people more than, say, disjointed nonsensical brain farts that have in common only the fact that they come from the same ten fingers.

4. Knowledge is power
If people don’t know about your blog then they are going to have a real problem reading it.  For that reason its important to be mentioned on other people’s blogs.  You can write oh so pretty and oh so well, but if nobody hits your page then nobody views your page, cappuccino? 

5. Language as a scalpel, rather than a club
Check your spelling, grammar and sentence structure.  There is nothing more annoying than people who spell things wrong.  Its so easy to spell check!  Why do people still not do it?  (Oh yeah and if you think that cutsie way of writing, with Z instead of S and you screw around with caps and all that, your wrong.  It isn’t cute, its annoying and, if I really think about it, you should die horribly, but that’s my opinion.)

So what does that mean?  How much of my own advice do I follow?  Pretty much none of it.  Will I implement these self discovered ‘truths’ about blogging?  I really can’t be bothered.  Instead I’ll start posting up useless bits of trivia at the end of my blogs.  I promise they will all be true, I should know as they all came from my grandmother’s friend’s cousin’s shopkeeper’s pet hamster’s droppings.  Really, they told me once when I was tripping on the adrenalin glands of a virgin donkey.  Here’s one:

Pigs can’t look up

posted by Symbol @ 27.7.04