What makes a blog a succes?

Once in a while you might come across new and unfamiliar tasks or challenges (to me blogging is one of these new challenges).

Usually when a new task or challenge is presented your first and uncertain steps are most often directed towards investigating; what is this new stuff really about? Fortunately the answers are never far away. The simple words “what is…” can take you almost anywhere and provide you with knowledge of your topic of interest on many different levels thanks to the wonders of the internet. 

In your search for knowledge i.e. of a specific product you might often end up finding your answers at a discussion forum or even a blog – and not at the product homepage. The home-experts and bloggers are in fact becoming more and more vital in our search for knowledge and many have further managed to make their knowledge sharing a profession. But how do they do this?

Key issues to my strategy:

To me the answer lies in the bloggers ability of contributing emergent, relevant and requested information and hence creating value to his users. If the blogger further manage to get the message out (to other than just the closest friends) a blogging success might be in the making.
A successful blogging strategy can also be simplified as sticking to the four C's:

• Community - aiming your post on your target audience
• Content - create quality content that can be of value to your reader 
• Consistency - write regularly so you don't lose your audience   
• Clarity - be clear, make it short and have fun!

My overall blogging strategy should therefore attempt to follow these guidelines and not fall into the me-and-my-bicycle-trap or other too navel-gazing perspectives. As this blog is mainly focused on issues related to the emerging concepts of social technology and Enterprise 2.0 I expect to put on my “nerdy” goggles and include relevant theory on the topic. My strategy is, however, also to keep an informal style of writing with plain discussions or in-depth analyses - both with a light season of humor, as this personally helps keeps me intrigued.

As this is my first blog I don’t have any high expectations of it becoming a huge success. Practice makes perfect so maybe in time when I have more experience and more knowledge on the subject I can allow myself to aim higher. For now the main goal, however, is just to get the message out there and above all LEARN. Next I will seek to participate in online discussions, starting with my class mates, by commenting on other blogs and by that, in time, gaining more experience (and hopefully more readers) in my new blogging “career”  

A blog worth reading

Formerly I have mainly read my friends travelling blogs from around the world – actually one of these blogs inspired me to come to Brisbane and study this semester at QUT. In terms  of presenting a specific blog that I find interesting and I think could contribute in a specific manner, I decided to highlight a blog concerning the ever important topic of: 

How to save money! 

Also it gives a few tips that might come in handy once we enter the real world (read: get a real job). The author pretty much cut the unnecessary content and writes in a straight forward way that I really like.

In other news

I know that the above mentioned pretty much covers the assignment for this week. I would, however, still like to open the debate with one of my favourite topics that I think relates to this unit the use of social media in one’s private life. Am I the only one who has come to wonder if I really need all this (read: a virtual life). Sometimes the thought of just pulling the plug has crossed my mind. The thought is, however, also a bit scary and I wonder If the action would leave me feeling completely free (and happy), cut off or perhaps would affect my future work relations (facebook and twitter are for instance a must in this class). I don’t question that networking and sharing knowledge through social technology is a huge advantage professionally, I just wonder if I can get the same professional profile without engaging in private social platforms?

Please feel free to comment and let us have a nice discussion :-)

references:

How to find anything on the internet

The four C's
How to save money

cons of social media in ones private life