5 Tips for New and Local Bloggers

As a conservative activist and new media enthusiast, I have taken particular interest in the number of local, or smaller, blogs that have sprung up with the rise of the tea party movement. No two blogs are the same (or even look the same) and each blogger has a completely different way of expressing their disgust for the progressive agenda. With each conservative blog that springs up on the interwebs, we can do a small victory dance that liberals no longer lay claim to technology and electronic communication.

Part of my role as a social media consultant involves finding and monitoring the conversation on the blogosphere, so I spend a good amount of time looking at individual blog sites. My experience has taught me this: the conservative movement may have found its voice online, but in some instances our delivery has left a bit to be desired.

These five tips are my quick suggestions for ways to better format your blogs, grow your audience, share your content online, and influence your communities.

1. Include Contact Information. This is perhaps my most important tip for bloggers. I have tried and failed to contact many blog sites with news information because there simply wasn’t any contact information listed. I understand that many bloggers choose to remain anonymous and I actually wouldn’t recommend including your personal email address. However it is easy to create a free gmail account in the form of yourblogname@gmail.com where interested parties can contact you. Create an account and be sure it is listed on the front page of your site! You never know what information or interesting tips you might be missing out on.

[Note: This also strongly applies to all tea party groups and local campaigns. If you do not have contact information listed, people cannot get involved and other groups cannot inform you of upcoming events that your group may be interested in!]

2. Include An About Page. Similar to including contact information, including an about page helps readers and other interested parties get to know you and your blog just a little bit better.  You can retain anonymity while providing readers with insight into your potential expertise about the topics you are blogging about, your political ideology, and your location. For example, your blog post about efforts to raise the cap on charter schools in the North Carolina General Assembly may carry more weight if your readers know you have been teaching in the NC public school system for over two decades.

Additionally, many statewide blogs and nonprofits looking to build out their blogrolls and link to local blogs, will look for keywords such as “North Carolina,” “conservative,” and “politics” in an about section of your blog before they will take the time to read through your blog posts to try to decipher your point of view.

3. Make Sharing Easy. Whether you are on social networks yourself, you should assume and hope that your readers are and make sharing your blog content an easy and inviting task for them. If your blog is hosted on WordPress, there are easy plugins that will integrate a share bar, the Facebook Like button, and Tweetmeme button directly into your blog with little work from you. If your blog is hosted on another site, Facebook will generate the Like button for you and you should still have options for sharing and Tweeting. These easy plugins allow your readers to share your blog posts with their social networks with very few clicks.

You will also want to include an RSS feed button on your website. This button allows readers who use tools such as Google Reader to aggregate all of their blog feeds into one place to easily subscribe to your blog. Many readers may subscribe to your blog without the RSS button, but the icon is a nice visual reminder to do so.

4. Consider Your Readers. Every once in a while you should step back and take a look at your blog from a reader’s point of view. Is the font too small? Do the colors make it hard to read? Are the pictures in your recent posts bigger than your post column? All of these things make your blog unpleasant to look at and, while your mother and wife may stick around to read it, very few others will.

There are two important points to remember when it comes to blog design: 1) Less is definitely more (this includes columns, pictures, dancing elephants, ads, links, and other general distractions) and 2) Our internet attention spans are very short. If your blog is hard to read or I have to constantly scroll or click to actually find your content, I won’t stick around and, worse, I will think you aren’t serious about blogging.

If you are unsure about your blog design, ask for feedback from members of your local tea party or other conservative groups. Members of your target audience are the best people to ask for feedback!

5. Focus Local. This last point is more about our movement than blog formatting in general and I am by no means the first to write about it. What you have to offer the blogosphere and conservative movement is your unique perspective about what is happening in your town, county, and even state. There are many, many bloggers here in North Carolina, but very few covering the General Assembly and even fewer covering local town councils. If you shift your focus from healthcare and other national issues and become one of a few bloggers focusing locally, the impact on your local community and the conservative movement could be huge.

Take these 5 tips back to your blog or pass them on to your favorite blogger! And, as always, please let me know if you have any questions!

Happy blogging!

This blog originally posted at majorityconnections.com.