I’d love to hear your view on what makes a good blog post. I’m still learning, but here are my musings so far:

NICHE

The big bloggers debate is whether you pigeon-hole yourself into writing knowledgably about a small subject you know a lot about, like What Katie Did or whether young journalists should keep an open-mind to avoid becoming too specialist.

INFORMATIVE

I find some of the best blogs are ‘how to’ tutorials. Because of the manageable size of a blog post, these tend to be good bite size lessons in how to do something specific. And with ‘how to’ being one of the most common search terms, they’re destined for big hit-rates. Signs of our Times is good for this.

OPINION

If they’re not informative, they tend to be opinion based. These seem to work best with more niche blogs – something I’m yet to master!

REGULARITY

It takes hard work and dedication but regularity is the key to getting on Google’s radar. But can you update too regularly? Iain Dale does this quite successfully, but I’m not sure anyone would want to read six posts a day from a student journalist!

SHORT

No-one wants to wade through an essay online. Studies show we read the first paragraph and then bits of everything else, so if it’s ten paragraphs long, we’ve usually lost interest.

READABLE

Bullet points, lists and short one-idea paragraphs work well.

The discussion is ongoing – please leave your views by clicking on the comments link!