Jake Dahn /

Now trust me, I’m no expert on making your blog famous, or popular by any means, but that is what I’m trying to do now, with jakedahn.com. I am trying to create a name for myself, and my work on the blogosphere. So far, it’s only been five days, and I can already see I have a long way to go before I gain the least bit of attention. Now the point of a blog isn’t to become rich and famous, or to gain status of any kind, in my opinion. But hey, it doesn’t hurt, does it? ;) So I will talk about some of the things that I think can help make your voice be heard around the blogosphere.

First off, you need some good content.

This is really where I think a lot of blogs miss the whole shabang when it comes to blogging. People want to be entertained, correct? So I think that having a lot of good content is a great thing. So yes, it will take a whole lot of time for anyone to pay attention to you. Take me for example, I’m trying to create some good reading material, and I can guarantee that only people who know me are reading this. But as I get better at writing, and things become more interesting, I can see them passing the word on to others about my blog. Ya hear that guys, pssst tell people about jakedahn.com *cough cough*

Though writing can be a major piece of content, I do believe that there are things far more useful than just entertaining material. I think that if you are a musician, you should really have some music around your blog. If you are a designer, I think that you should be showing off some of your work. (this is what I plan on doing.) When the time is right, I will start releasing free web templates, they will be licensed with CC and will be released with an intention of open source goodness, these templates will be released as just plain html, and as a wordpress theme. If you ask me, wordpress is the way to go if you’re going to be blogging, so releasing any content, that may be of any media, can be beneficial. It can bring in traffic, and interest.

Second, you need links!

If you want to make it in the blogging world, you are going to need some links, from others. Whether it be to specific articles, or to your front-page, having people link to you is great. It can increase the number of people who come to your site, and maybe even the number of people who keep coming back. So links are basically crucial. If you ask me :)

Third, you should know your english.

This kind of goes along with the good content thing. If you are going to want people to enjoy your content, and keep coming back, you can sure as hell bet that good english can help. If I go to a site, that has a few spelling errors, it’s kind of like, oh ok, I see how it is, but if they have major grammatical errors, it’s like saying “hey, go away, I don’t want you to read this!”

Fourth, design.

Sure there are people who persist to say, content over design. Which is completely understandable, but there are just soo many websites, with great content, that are over-looked because of the lack of a good design. I’m not sure of the exact number, but an average internet user will make up their mind about a website, based on the design, in a fraction of a second. That leaves no room to breath, so you better have something nice looking.

Fifth, SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

This is one of those things that I know little about. I just started learning about how things like this work, and it’s a very simple concept to grasp, but can be hard to do. You basically want all of your content to be indexable by a search engine. So if I go to google, and search for something, I’m going to want to find that thing. If you have the right key words, good amount of links and it matches the context, you’ll be getting traffic from search engines. That’s how I see it anyway.

Anyway these are just some things I think make a big difference in the popularity of a blog. I’m going to try to practice the best of all blogging habbits, for jakedahn.com. If anything goes wrong, you’ll all know!

Thanks for reading :)