Gemma SouthgateSenior Library Assistant,

Arts and Social Studies Library@Gemma_DS

Blogging:Creating good content

Choosing a platform

Your job is to come up with a list of content you’re comfortable creating. For example:

•Standard posts: New opening times or changes to procedures

•Short-advice posts: Give one concrete piece of advise using a minimum of words.

•Comprehensive tutorials on how to do one specific task. Like a post on how to use myPrint

•Lists of valuable tools, software, articles, links, and so on.

•A series of posts focusing on one broad topic. Each episode should explain one aspect of the issue.

•Videos. e.g. Celebrating Swansea Authors http://www.youtube.com/user/CelebrateSUAuthors

•Podcasts.

•Shout-out posts – where you mention the work of other people in the niche.

•Discussion posts – where you ask a question and then take close notice of the discussion taking place in the comments.

Choosing a Topic – take a little extra time defining your topic and the post will flow better and you’ll develop something that matters to readers. If you’re not interested in that topic why not let someone else blog about it.

Crafting Your Post’s Title – perhaps the most crucial part of actually getting readers to start reading your post when they see it in an RSS reader or search engine results page.

The Opening Line – first impressions matter. Once you’ve got someone past your post’s title your opening line draws them deeper into your post.

Making your posts matter -a post needs to have a point. If it’s just an intriguing title and opening you’ll get people to read – but they wont come back.

Call to Action – driving readers to do something cements a post in their mind and helps them to apply it and helps you to make a deeper connection with them.

Adding Depth – before publishing your post – ask yourself how you could add depth to it and make it even more useful and memorable to readers? Could you add more links to other resources?

Quality Control– small mistakes can be barriers to engagement for some readers. Spending time fixing errors and making a post ‘look’ good can take it to the next level.

Timing of Publishing Your Post – timing can be everything – strategic timing of posts can ensure the right people see it at the right time.

Post Promotion – having hit publish – don’t just leave it to chance that your post will be read by people. Giving it a few strategic ‘nudges’ can increase the exposure it gets exponentially.

Conversation – often the real action happens once your post is published and being interacted with by readers and other bloggers. Taking time to dialogue can be very fruitful.

Pulse - Swansea University Science and Engineering Library bloghttp://blog.swansea.ac.uk/pulse/

Cardiff School of Art and Design blog - http://csadlibrarynews.wordpress.com/

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http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/03/17/how-long-do-your-readers-stay-at-your-blog-length-of-stay-

statistics/

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