There are thousands of websites containing articles on how to become a better blogger or simply how to blog. Enter any of these websites and you will find numerous articles on interlinking, connecting with other bloggers, increasing page rank, getting traffic, exploiting social media, and blah, blah, blah. Where the heck is “CONTENT”? If content is king, as each bloggers say, why are these websites full of everything except content.

And frankly, people don’t visit your blog post because it is linked with other sites or because it has more keywords. They visit your blog just for two reasons. First, because they are your friends or you just know them. They come because you have maintained a personal relation with them in some or the other way.

And second, they visit your website to read your articles. They come because they think you know much about the topic and they want to learn from you. Or maybe your articles are simple entertaining and they like it.

You can definitely pull them a long way by involving personally in your blog. This can be done by replying to every comment or emailing them.

However, they are the ones who have already visited your blog and like you because of your personal touch. But what about the people who are directed to your website through search engines? They want information. They want quality content. They want something that hooks them, entertains them, and give them a reason to search for other articles on your blog.

The rule to get more visitors is simple. You have to write excellent articles. Period.

However, what is the difference between a simple article and an excellent one? How can an article be effective? Here are 10 Habits of Highly Effective People:

1. They Don’t Make Grammatical Mistakes:
   If you fail to use correct grammar in your article, it’s no more effective. People quickly understand you are an amateur or a novice. You lose the authority and significance. The readers no longer believe that you have more knowledge than them.
2. They Don’t Use Jargon:
   Everyone wants to astound their readers. I like doing it. But that doesn’t mean you do it by using words that few understand. They aren’t holding an Oxford dictionary while reading your article. Keep it simple, always.
3. They are personal:
   Personal doesn’t mean you ask your reader to post their girlfriend’s number in the comments. It means having a personal touch. Share your personal experience; show your self in the article.
4. They are humorous:
   The best way to attract, retain, and mesmerize your readers is to add humor to your posts. I am sure most of the people like to smile, so they will visit your posts regularly. Use sarcasm, irony, satire, jokes, or funny examples to create humor.
5. Use Stories and Examples:
   Theory is quite boring. Blogger who keep posting theories need to understand that their readers aren’t attending a high school. They need information with fun and clear understanding. Provide examples and stories, which will help them comprehend the message.
6. They are easily readable:
   Make sure the readers read your full article. Most of the readers don’t because you scare them away with the quantity of your post. They just skim through the post and try to grasp the message. I know they can understand much, but that’s what they do and you know it. However, you still keep writing 2000 words article. Keep it short.
7. They provoke action:
   Have you ever written an article which asks the reader to do something immediately after finishing the article? You didn’t? D o it. It’s very effective.
8. They initiate interaction:
   A good article attracts lots of comments. However, they are many blogs that doesn’t get a single comment. Here is a simple tip: Ask your readers something like feedback, suggestion, or a direct question.
9. They are full of information:
   Write informative articles. Let them clearly how something works. Provide tutorials about something in some easy steps. Define a very difficult process in simple terms. Give them precious information.
10. They are well designed and organized:
    As mentioned earlier, most of the readers just go through the main topics and sub topics. Great, now you know their secret. Provide them what they want. Write the article in pointer format with titles and sub-titles in large fonts.

No, I am not as perfect and effective as Stephen Covey. But I guess together we can be better. Let me know other elements of a good article.

I read your post and not surprisingly, I get bored. However, it wasn’t any other boring article. It was awfully unexciting and it gave me a long lasting headache, OUCH! I would prefer hanging out with someone like Tom Hank’s character from the movie Castaway or even talking to Wilson (the volleyball) rather than reading your post.

After going though your post, I went down the street and bought a pack of Tylenol, but it didn’t help. So, I held my head tightly, went near a corner of my house and faced the wall for some minutes. Wow, that was so better than your article. I started recovering and as soon as I came out of the trauma, I sat down and started writing this article to let you know how boring you are.

Many bloggers think that their post is uber cool and electrifying. The fact is it’s nothing more than boring and a major headache trigger.

Nobody thinks your blog is super cool except you.

Really. It’s better you face the fact and wipe out this misconception. You need to get out of your usual perspective and learn what others think about your post. You should have done this much earlier. However, it’s never too late. Avoid

paralyzing people. Avoid punishing them. Here are few things that could possibly spice up your article and make it a bit readable:

1. Add humor:
   Do you remember the last time you added a little sarcasm in your post? Do you ever think of quoting a humorous line or a funny statement? Did you ever realize that making fun can be used as an interest-grabbing tool? No? I did it today.
2. Add Excitement:
   After your draft your post, don’t directly post it. Add some adjectives that could give meaning and support your content. Make sure you add some powerful words that’s boosts the strength of your article.
3. Add stories:
   Real or fake, I don’t care. Just add some interesting stories that grabs the attention of your readers. Tell them how you got slapped by a women or how you bumped you car. However, make sure you are in sync with the title; otherwise it might just trigger another headache.
4. Add yourself:
   By this, I don’t mean your photos, you might scare somebody. Let your personality glitter through your post. Instead of introducing yourself to others, let your readers know about you are through your writing. Share your ideas, share yourself.

These would really help you improve your blog content and yes, it would also keep many readers away from a serious headache.

Okay. Let’s get serious here. The post doesn’t intend to offend anyone. My sole intention of writing such a post is: I want you to know the significance of entertainment in your post. It’s very important. People want something interesting. Look at it from the reader’s point of view, PLEASE!

Enough of me teaching you about blog posts. Now, it’s your time. Tell me what are the other things that can spice up a post? What are the other elements of an interesting post? Just remember, I ain’t talking about the amount or quality of information in your article. I have written many articles on quality.

Scripting text is easy, but not all can master it. A good content is as significant as the grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of your blog post. Well, before I reveal the importance of the content and how it affects your blog, let’s define ‘good’ in blogging.

So, what is a ‘good content’?

Content can be termed as ‘good’ when it intends to share the message clearly and unambiguously to the readers. It is drafted with focus on tremendous quality. However, good content is not only text. It comprises of many other elements like videos, pictures, statistics, or any other techniques that helps the reader to comprehend the message quite easily and pleasingly. Ideally, it should include a combination of any or all of these elements.

If your content is really good and liked by the readers, it gains traffics quickly. Readers tweet or digg it because they find the content to be quite helpful, humorous, perceptive, or sometimes weird. They start valuing your blog and revisit to check your next post.

SEO can definitely help your post to be read by visitors, but hooking and pleasing them depends entirely on the quality of your post.

Let me reveal a secret that can help you to construct a really ‘good content.’ Write about something that you intent to learn. Your curiosity helps you to collect the best pieces of information, the assortment of which makes a good content. And remember, if you are curious about something, be sure that there would be many readers craving for similar information.

Okay. The definition of a ‘good content’ is quite comprehensible now. Let’s move on and learn its significance.

The importance of good content

Traffic is definitely an indispensable reason to write a good content for your blog. However, below are the four reasons why you should write amazing content when you start a blog.

1. To promote the best. Do not hesitate to reveal the best you have in your first post. Let people know you have what it takes to be the most excellent blogger.
2. In future, you will write great stuff. If you start with a great article, it is more likely that you will post an article that’s better than the previous one because gradually, you keep improving.
3. Readers can differentiate between good and bad. First impression is truly the last impression when it comes to blogging. Readers visit your blog because they are searching for some good and genuine content. If they don’t like it the first time, they will never return. Why take such a chance?
4. Definition of your blog and its magnitude of excellence. The first article will help readers comprehend whether or not you know about the topic. You must conduct an extensive research and generate a post that is quite satisfying and precise. People should immediately assume that you know much more than them. If this happens, they will definitely visit your blog again, but they will also inform their friends about it. This is the power of good content.

It’s quite simple to understand the significance of a ‘good content’, but generating one is not.

Fabricating a good content

Although posting frequently is good way to attract readers, posting excellent quality articles is a much better way to magnetize huge mass. It requires discipline, hard work, and time to generate the best post. Here are four points that can help you surge the quality level to the top.

1. Your post should be extremely helpful. This means proving the readers more than what they are looking for. However, there is a difference between proving more and providing junk.
2. It must be complemented with an attractive headline. Headlines must compel the readers to read the content. An excellent article is useless and repels visitors if it has an uninteresting and common headline. To generate a good headline you can use a question, customized quotation, weird assumption, etc. However, it important to ensure that it relates with the articles.
3. Be precise or provide a summary of the article that helps the reader to comprehend the contents of the post. Exploring sentence by sentence just to know what the article is about, infuriates the reader.
4. The content should be simple and concise. Here, I am not referring to the style of writing which is unique. The language should be simple and understandable by most of the readers. Also the message should not be prolonged. Come straight to the point and keep it short.

Although all the points mentioned above are important and cannot be neglected, the most significant is the title. If the title isn’t attractive, the visitor won’t even click on it and automatically, the other three points will be useless. So, it’s essential to generate a title that’s creative and entices maximum number of visitors to click on it.

There are two elements to generate a good headline. First, do not create a headline before finishing the article and second, put some efforts to brainstorm a brilliant title.

Clarity is another significant element that your content is responsible to provide the readers. Firstly, it should be easily understood by the readers. Secondly, tell them in advance about the content of your article. For instance, the content of this article is clearly mentioned in the first paragraph.

Wrapping up

By now you must have understood the definition, importance, and production of a good content. Start applying these things in your very next post and focus on the quality of the content.

Lots been said and done about blogging industry, people refer to thousands of websites before setting up their own blogs network, they take ideas from other blogs, some willfully copy the whole content and codes from other blogs, some design similar type of design, we do almost any thing under the sun to make our blog really popular like other blogging networks, isn’t it? The most important buzzword, everybody knows today is “Quality Content”, even a common laymen walking on the streets would tell you that, “if you need a blog, you need a quality content”, so what exactly is the quality content, aren’t the things we write usually “A quality” perhaps may be yes or no, it depends on the people’s perception and the idea behind the blog or an article.

As a profession, I meet many people, many writers, and many bloggers from the industry and seriously their writings, ah, I feel they are really a work of art, what makes all of them so appealing to read. Great posts are those, which teach you something, it provides you with information that you can use for your own business or research work. Whenever you see any creative writings, remember, some one has put lots of thoughts in to writing the creative work of art, as writing is an art, it’s a gifted talent. The blogging is really some hot news for new entrepreneurs but at the same time, I feel its getting in some machine like trend, not really as a good news. Blogs as they grow and mature, earn good money but I see a downfall with the new blogs, there may be varied reasons to it.

The most important aspect of keeping your blog alive is by maintaining its value and updating it on a daily basis. What I stress here is on producing the real content, the original useful content for the users of your site. Most of the times we see people vying only for the traffic and in transit, they come nowhere to their matched targets of producing the valued, quality content. So does it really satisfy their purpose of setting up the blog at first place? While some people wonder in amazement, that such things do really exist in blogosphere, the more the hype, the more the confusion amongst people to look for different ways to put across their content.

One thing I agree upon is, you do need a traffic to drive your website, but that shouldn’t be the only aim for you, traffic which is relevant, sometimes the SEO of the site leads an individual to your site and after entering the site, he might find nothing what he was looking for, so what is important is bringing the relevant traffic to the site, as people entering your site will start liking your content, they might refer even more people to use your site and in a way you are increasing your popularity in the blogging networks. Yes, blogging is all about making money, but use your little brains rather than imitating some other blogger, creative ideas are what blogs made of, if you cant come with something unique and creative, you stand no place in blogging world.

Some people think, the earliest bloggers where the lucky ones to reach their positions today, partially it may be correct but second reason is that, they came out with unique stuff that time when they started, as blogging was a new industry a decade back, it was them who thought of creating such ideas which can yield them popularity. Now, blogging is very popular though, but still you can come up with unique concept may be a blog gaming site or a membership site, library site where people blog about their books read. The opportunities are numerous; you have to just get your thinking right in the specific field. As I mentioned it earlier too, CONTENT is the most important thing in blogosphere, having thousands of readers and the number of tweets on your blog doesn’t make it necessarily a super content website, as the site get accommodated with valued data which is in great demand may be relating to a woman health or a finance blog or a beauty blog with proper SEO of the site, they are going to be super hit whether it has good content or no. So are we cheating on our readers or cheating ourselves? With the kind of content we put, we know we have put good content but is there a way to justify whether its really a good content or for that matter the amount of visitors and the comments or tweets we get? There is no official way of justifying your site whether it has good content or no, but I have come up with a little self study questions which if answered honestly would give you an answer to your queries and you can grade your site accordingly:

1. Going through your blog comments by readers on a regular basis would give you an idea of what your readers feel about the particular subject topic.
2. If there are lots of discussions going on between your readers, which requires each other to answer the questions with a solid proof, that sounds a good news for you, because people do strongly agree with you and your ideas relating to a particular topic.
3. If your follower has written 1 or 2 sentences, its probably because he agrees with you and supports you on the topic, he doesn’t has any objections.
4. In reality, there are very few people who would write their comments as,  “Great Posts”.
5. If you have few comments telling you about the content and people agree with you, that means they like your content and the data is useful to them.

Different blogging sites have different purposes and they serve different categories of people, if your site is new and you don’t get much comments, don’t get nervous, this is the start, remember and you probably would be happy, if there are less comments and all of them are positive. Positive comments are the deciding factors for your site and not by the number of visitors or the tweets you get. This was a very interesting, yet complicated topics for discussions, I hope you got insight in to what I really wanted to portray here, if yes, then please share your views here.