Bill Belew

This guest post is by Darren Dias.

I thought I’d share my blogging resolutions for New Year 2012, because it seems to be the popular thing to do.

Therein lies the seed for the first resolution, which is to write about things which are popular instead of sharing fascinating pictures of my cat snoozing all day long. Unless, of course, the blog is about cats.

That’s the second resolution – no matter what subject your blog is about, be on topic. There’s a difference between resolutions one and two, because you can be on topic and yet write about something incredibly boring that no one wants to read.

Put together 1 & 2, and write interesting posts related to the subject of your blog. This can be breaking news, top 5 or 10 lists, or an analysis of some hot trend or topic that everyone wants to talk about – like smart phones, social media, election coverage, celebrities, etc.

Remember that you still need to be on-topic, but there are plenty of ways to plug in these trends into something related to the blog’s subject. For example, former Gov. Mitt Romney just won the Iowacaucus. A financial blog could focus on what would policies he would enact if Mitt Romney went on to win the GOP nomination and then became President.

If you don’t do things like this, your blog will soon be among the 95 percent of blogs that are discarded by their owners within 3 months of launching, if not the 60 to 80 percent who do so after a month.

That brings us to Resolution No.3, which is to use facts, names, places and specific things that people can connect with. A blog post blathering on in general without any supporting facts and statistics or discussion about specifics isn’t going to be very interesting.

Speaking of interesting, Resolution No.4 is to make sure to include pictures and videos in each post. No matter how interesting or exclusive your text content may be, it just doesn’t attract attention if there’s no image or video.

It’s not so hard to find images under the creative commons license that you can use without paying for them. Flickr has over 6 billion images, Wikimedia has another 12 million or so, and 3 billion YouTube videos get viewed each day.

Lastly, resolution No.5 is to publish at least one post every single day. The point is to keep visitors and the search bots coming in every day to read new content. That’s what builds loyalty, and you really cannot expect a reader to come back unless they’re sure there’s going to be something new to read or talk about.