Whenever I begin to help a new student or client with blogging, I ask them to answer three really important questions:

1. What is the intent of your blog?
2. Who is your audience for your blog?
3. What is your authority in your blogging topic?

The authority question is almost always the hardest for people to answer. In other words, why would other people want to read what you have to say. I recognize that it can be an intimidating question to answer but it is a crucial one. Let’s get the intimidation part out of the way first.

Authority doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of alphabet behind your name and titles. It does mean getting clear about your strengths  and your goals.  Here are some examples of authority:

• Experience in developing over 20 commercial web sites for a blog on web design
• Retired attorney for blog on estate planning
• Stay at home father of two for daddy blogging
• Breast cancer survivor and nurse for blog on healthy living
• Fantastic sense of humor for a blog on finding the humor in our lives
• Mushroom forager for 5 years and amateur chef for a blog on edible mushrooms
• 15 years of indulging in your love of hand crafts, a keen eye and a creative mind for a blog on crafting
• Passion for the environment, problem solving aptitude and creativity for a blog on recycling goods into crafts

As you can see from the examples above, authority can take many forms. Appropriate and effective authority will vary according to your blog intent and audience.

Once you have outlined your intent, audience and authority, how do evaluate the effectiveness of your authority? That was an interesting question posed by a young 17 year old guest blogger Lianne in her post Does your blog speak authoritatively? for Cats Who Blog. She answers with the following, for traditional blogs and for the micro-blog Twitter:

• Repeat Traffic
• Feed Subscriber count
• Social Media Followers
• Twitter Mention

Traffic and subscriber counts are traditional means of monitoring blog progress and impact but with the increasing importance of social media, those two factors are no longer sufficient to measure  your authority. Translate the word authority into trust.

How much do your readers trust you enough:

• to keep coming back?
• to follow you around so they don’t miss what you have to say?
• trust you enough to share what you say with others?

Cats Who Blog is a relatively new web site, an offshoot of Cats Who Code, one of my favored web development tip and tutorial web sites. I am verifying their authority because I subscribe to their feed, follow on Twitter and used one of their blog posts to anchor my own (called pingback). All of those things validate Jean-Baptiste Jung’s authority in creating those two blogs.

---

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am writing this post to enter a contest sponsored by Cats Who Blog. I think contests can be an effective means of blog promotion and I applaud Cats Who Code for showing other bloggers the benefits of running a contest and offering Templatic premium themes as the prizes.

Controversy

Taking on a controversal topic in your blog requires a clear opinion or a keen awareness of your own ambivalence and indecision. Some of us shy away from controversy while others may crave the energy and attention that stirring up a hornet’s nest brings. Some bloggers will try to create controversal headlines to attract readers but fail to follow through in providing information or insight to the conversation.

Is it Art or Porn?

Recently, one of the LVS students successfully presented a controversial subject and offered both information and insight to the controversy while encouraging her readers to examine their own stand. Art is a very personal topic and has certainly been controversial for ages. Add in the religious, societal, personal and political values that we hold in regards to nudity and you are upping in the ante. Bring in the subject of children and without care you have such an explosive topic that emotions and outrage cloud all opportunities for meaningful discussion. In her blog post on the Bill Henson Controversy and nudity in art, she does a masterful job of bringing the current controversy to frame her own questions and musings about nudity in art.

Light and Shadow

From the artist’s perspective, the human form is a interesting collection of angles and curves, light and shadow. Like the choices they make in regards to paints and medium, an artist uses angles and curves to convey their message and to garner an emotional response. Sometimes the choice of nudity is a conscious one, banking on the emotional response of the audience to the nude. Sometimes it less conscious as the artist focuses on the subject not as a nude but light and shadow.  When an artist focuses on the latter, it can be a surprise to them when the audience reacts to the nudity instead of the shadows they lovingly created or captured. The same can be true of the blogger. 

Bringing it Full Circle

When dealing with a controversial subject, you might be posting with a particular focus and expecting feedback on that focus. It can be a bit startling to start getting emotional reactions to what you construed to be the minor facts of your blog post. Blogging can be an enlightening education on the views and ethics of many communities. Quirky Artist explores the diverse reactions to nudity in art, acknowledges her own journey to her current stand. This includes discussing her grey areas and her convictions are clear.  She brings her posting to a close by stating her own personal stand in the Bill Henson controversy. Her headline was not just to entice the reader, she used it to frame the entire post in a very successful way.

I encourage you to visit her post and join in the discussion. Look at how she handled controversy and how you might envision discussing controversal topics in your own blog.

It happens to every writer. There are those days when your creative fountain of ideas has run dry and you are confronted with an empty screen.  Journal or diary bloggers could just detail their errands and comings and going, but that tends to bore the writer not to mention the reader!

On Problogger today, Darren Rowse wrote a post titled “5 Ideas to Come Up with Blog Content from Your Daily Life“.  Although I could see how his five ideas could help generate content, I was more intrigued by his diagram that showed Daily Life – Capture – Repurpose. Instead of just telling your readers that you ate your favorite Indian dal for dinner, share the recipe with them and/or tempt them with a photo of your feast.  Darren is correct in stating that sharing your “latest meal” is probably not going to be appropriate for most topic bloggers like those that blog on collector cars or wilderness photography. It is totally appropriate for the journal blogger or the blogger that focuses on food or delectable delights. Capture how you do things and what they look like. Web surfers are used to a multimedia experience and if you incorporate images and video, you will cater to their surfing expectations. You could type out an anecdote that you want to share with your readers, but think of how much more engaging that story might be with your vocal inflections and facial expressions in a video. There is a reason that You-Tube is as popular as it is. Humans like to watch!

Recapture can be viewed as recycling your blog content in a fresh and innovative way. Using a guest blogger to respond more in depth or to give their point of view on a prior post can encourage additional dialog. Your guest doesn’t even need to be actually written by another human. If you have been blogging about your toddler on your parenting blog and feeling overwhelmed, try writing a blog post from the perspective  of your two year old. It will probably be amusing and maybe even enlightening. When I worked on a blog for an organic farm, and we were too busy farming to actually blog, I would often ask customers if I could share their emails on the blog. I could post their rapture over the fresh luscious organic raspberrries that they got from us last week and attach a brief note about berry status this week. It allowed me to consolidate my time, provide another point of view on the berries, and answer questions about berry availability, all at once. Another way to recapture content is to provide updates. In another blog, I frequently post about bills in the local legislature. If they passed or failed, got vetoed or signed, I can provide update to my readers and allow me to voice again my concerns or congratulations on how the government is handling an issues.