There’s editorial workflow, scheduling, and author management to consider, among other things.

Below are fifteen plugins that can make managing your multi-author blog a lot easier.

They include editorial workflow plugins, scheduling and calendar plugins, and plugins that will benefit your authors or make it easier to communicate with them.

EditFlow

EditFlow is one of the most useful plugins for managing posts on a multi-author blog. It allows you to set up custom editorial statuses for your posts, to better manage your workflow. It also sets up a feedback system directly in the post, to help eliminate emails going back and forth between authors and editors. It’s a must for blogs with any kind of editorial process.

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar plugin is great for blogs that need to schedule posts ahead of time, which includes most multi-author blogs. Editorial Calendar gives you a visual look at your upcoming posts and when they’re scheduled, and shows you gaps in your schedule.

WP Status Notifier

WP Status Notifier will automatically send emails to a specified address whenever a post is submitted for review, eliminating the need to check manually. You can also set it to email the post’s author when a post is approved or sent back to drafts.

Audit Trail Plugin

Audit Trail lets you keep track of what’s happening inside your blog by logging certain actions. You can record things like user logins, post saves, and other common functions so you know exactly who’s doing what on your blog.

Dashboard Notepad

Dashboard Notepad lets you leave notes in your blog’s dashboard. You can set who can edit notes and who can simply read them. It’s a great place for leaving instructions or other information for your writers.

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder

Genki Pre-Publish Reminder inserts a box in the post sidebar to remind your authors about anything important they need to do before publishing their posts. It accepts both HTML and PHP code for plenty of flexibility.

Auto-Schedule Posts

Auto-Schedule Posts takes over the post scheduling on your blog for you. It catches posts as they’re published and holds them until they meet your predefined criteria for being posted. You can set posts to only publish between certain hours, on certain days, and with a minimum amount of time between posts.

WP Hide Dashboard

WP Hide Dashboard removes the Dashboard menu from your WordPress backend for select user roles. You can also eliminate the Dashboard links in the admin menu, and prevent Dashboard access to users assigned to the Subscriber role (so they can edit their profiles but otherwise not have access to the Dashboard). It works with single site and multisite modes, and with BuddyPress.

Co-Authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus lets you assign multiple authors to a single post, page, or custom post type. Co-authored posts will show up on the feeds for both authors, and on the posts page for each.

Advanced Access Manager

With any multi-author blog, you’re almost certainly going to want to restrict the access that some users have. Advanced Access Manager lets you do just that. You can filter the admin menu, dashboard widgets, and list of metaboxes for particular user roles. You can also create new user roles, delete user roles, and otherwise fine-tune access. You can even apply settings to all the blogs in a multi-site setup.

Author Exposed

Author Exposed adds a hidden div with author information that can be exposed when a user clicks on the author’s name on a post. It has space to include the author’s email and website address, as well as a Gravatar and “About” section.

Cool Author Box

Cool Author Box adds a prominent author bio at the end of your post, in a styled box. It also includes support for a Gravatar, a link to the author’s website, and links to other posts by the same author.

Private Email Plugin

This Private Email Plugin lets you send an email out to the registered users of your blog. It creates a new submenu where you can send an email to specific users, based on user roles. It also reports back the success rate of each email, so you know if any of your users’ email addresses are out of date.

Adminimize

Adminimize visually minimizes the administrative header so you can see more admin page content. It also lets you hide unnecessary items from the WP admin menu, submenu, and the Dashboard, plus hide items from the post meta controls on Write pages to simplify the editing interface. And of course you can customize what’s hidden based on user roles.

Category Reminder

Since uncategorized posts end up with the default category assignment (which is often “Uncategorized”), it’s important that your authors remember to add a category to their post before publishing it. The Category Reminder plugin uses JavaScript to verify that a post category has been assigned, and will prompt the user to add one before publishing.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Do you run a multi-author blog? Do you have any recommendations for plugins that make running it easier? Let us know in the comments!

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With more than 80,000 RSS subscribers and over 340,000 Twitter followers, WDD is great exposure for bloggers and designers alike.

We’re looking to hire some regular paid bloggers with a strong design background.

Contributors should be able to write at least one blog post per month, between 1,200 and 2,000 words.

Read on for more details!

We’re particularly looking for contributors knowledgeable about:

• WordPress
• Responsive design
• Mobile design
• “How to” type of posts for web design topics, including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript

Contributors will need to be familiar with posting via WordPress. Full editorial guidelines will be provided. To apply, please email the following to  cameron@webdesignerdepot.com:

• Links to published writing samples, preferably related to design or technology.
• Three topic ideas for WDD.
• How often you can contribute (we’re looking for contributors who can write 1-4 posts/month).

It may take up to a week to hear back, so please be patient. If you haven’t heard back within a week, please feel free to follow up in case we didn’t receive your first email (it’s helpful if you include the information above again, as well as indicating that it’s a follow-up).

Thanks and we look forward to working with you!

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It serves to inform and entertain, but is also an essential tool for driving traffic back to your website and improving your overall search-engine ranking.

If all your feed does is show a poorly formatted excerpt of your posts, the hundreds of visitors who are not hitting your main site everyday will have no reason to read your content or share it with others.

When optimizing your RSS Feed, you have to consider the kind of content you curate. There are several reasons why you may want to use your feed to generate clicks. You may have a product, feature or art-directed element to your full site that needs exposure, or your content may be largely image-driven.

Here are some simple tips for optimizing and RSS Feed that will improve its functionality and get it to produce positive results for your site.

1. Use Feedburner

Feedburner is not just a fad application you should use because it is a part of Google’s app offerings. It has serious power and provides extensive traffic analysis and optional ad delivery mechanisms that you won’t find anywhere else for a cost of zero dollars.

Feedburner integrates several of the core functionalities you need for your RSS Feed to be successful. Activate SmartFeed and the Title/Description Burner to start.

2. Give your feed a strong title

In most cases, your feed will inherit the name of your website. If that name is ambiguous or starts with a Z, your feed may not get the attention it deserves.

Try to start your feed with a letter that occurs earlier in the alphabet, as most readers are alphabetic. Make sure it contains keywords that relate to what your content has to offer, or provides enough detail for your readers to remain familiar with it. For example” Shadowy Ramblings of an Artist” would be better phrased as “Art & Remablings of John Scott.”

If you don’t want to change your website title, you can give your Feed its own title under the “Title/Description” option of the Optimize tab in Feedburner.

3. Enhance your blog with Feed-boosting plugins

If you took my advice on #1 and have your feed setup in Feedburner, there may be a plugin available for your CMS or blogging platform to help direct feed traffic through Feedburner for the most impact. Below are links to some of the most common:

Blogger

• Redirect
• RSS Widget
• Email Subscriptions

TypePad

• Redirect
• RSS Widget
• Email Subscriptions

WordPress

• FeedBurner plugin
• Yoast SEO

4. Write content with high SEO value

Using descriptive keywords in your post titles, adding “ALT” descriptions to links and tagging your content properly will help search engines index your content faster. If you are writing an article on the medicinal qualities of the spearmint herb, an optimized title would be “Spearmint medicinal qualities for healthy living.” This title places the important keywords at the beginning, and adds a “hook” phrase to the end that targets readers interested in healthy living, who may not have otherwise cared about mint.

If you use WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin is a complete solution for your blog that includes feed optimization settings and a simple addition to your post editor for creating alternate titles and keywords intended for your feeds and search results.

5. Always use fully qualified URLs when linking to other sites or content on your own site.

A fully qualified URL contains “http://” and your domain, rather than an internal path such as “../blog/?=234” or similar. Some websites may not be able to syndicate your feed if your links are not properly set. This includes making sure links to external sites always open in a new window or tab by using target=”_blank” in your link tags.

6. Include ALT text for your images.

Not only does this ensure your feed meets accessibility standards for screen-readers, it allows your images to be properly syndicated. This is critical if you publish a photoblog or other image-centered content.

7. Separate images from content

If you have an art-directed blog or your content revolves around photos, you will want to drive readers back to the main site to view your content in its full glory. Consider removing images from your feed or only providing a post thumbnail, and offering a separate feed for images. This method optimizes your content feed for mobile devices and drives users who are interested in your visual content to your main website.

8. Add a footer to your RSS Feed

Use an RSS footer to add social bookmarking links, copyright information, related post links, author information, or ad graphics to the bottom of each post. This tactic dramatically increases the number of clicks to other articles on your blog and keeps your content circulating. Most social bookmarking plugins for WordPress offer an option for adding themselves to your feed. FeedBurner also provides footer options for adding email subscription and social links with the FeedfFlare optimization.

9. Ping regularly

Pinging notifies various search engines that your feed has been updated and invites them to come index your content for higher visibility. The Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, along with many other quality SEO plugins, includes an option for pinging some services automatically when new content is published on your blog.

If you are using a different platform, or want more control over pining, you can use a free service like Ping-O-Matic or Feedshark. Add your Blog Name, Site URL and Feed URL, then select the engines to ping. If you opt to use FeedBurner, PingShot is available under your Publisize tab and provides a similar service.

10. Get backlinks

It does no good to have an awesome feed if no one is reading it. Help boost your feed’s popularity by submitting it for syndication across scores of networks.

Before doing this, it is a good idea to make sure everything else I’ve covered above is in order, especially the copyright information in your feed footer. Additionally, add a link back to your website, even if the feed already links individual items to the original post on your blog.

Written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Vail Joy. She is a freelance designer and tech blogger with a deep interest in all things web-related. She also enjoys writing for WIX, the free website builder.

Have you taken the time to optimize your site’s RSS feed?

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Tumblogging is a great option for those people who don’t want to post long blog posts, but do want to share images, music, videos, and other snippets of content with their followers.

There’s less pressure with a tumblog than there is with a regular blog, and it’s often viewed as a much more casual kind of presence. So the question becomes, which platform should you use?

Should you sign up for Tumblr? Or should you host your own tumblog with the self-hosted version of WordPress? Or is there something else entirely you could do? Read on to find out.

WordPress for tumblogging

Since the release of WordPress 3.0, you’ve had the ability to add your own custom post types to WP. This opens up a lot of possibilities for tumblogging, as you can set post types with custom formats for videos, photos, audio, quote, text, and other kinds of post content. It’s now much easier for developers to create tumblog themes that actually look more like the tumblogs you’d see on sites like Tumblr. This removes one of the big disadvantages that used to exist in using WordPress for tumblog-style posting.

The WooTumblog plugin makes it even easier to set up your tumblog on WP. Just install the plugin and WooTubmlog will add a Tumblog posting feature to your Dashboard to make it easy to post Article, Image, Link, Audio, Video, and Quote post types.

The biggest advantage WordPress has is that it’s self-hosted. You have complete control over your content. You can choose whatever host you want, customize your site in whatever way you want, and otherwise be a complete control freak.

Downsides of WordPress

Of course, with all the control WordPress offers, it also means you’re 100% responsible for maintaining your blog. You’re not just responsible for updating the content. You’re also in charge of making sure your site is secure, that your plugins are up to date, and that you don’t have any malicious code on your site. This is often easier said than done.

The other downside to WordPress when compared to Tumblr is that it’s not free. You’ll need at least a basic web host, and that’s going to cost you at least a few dollars a month for even the most basic service. If your tumblog is high-traffic, it might cost you a lot more than that, especially considering the volume of media generally present on a tumblog site.

Seven themes for your WP tumblog

While there are dozens of themes out there for tumblogging with WordPress, here are five that are great to get you started.

CoPilot

Waves

Crisp

Tapestry Child Theme

My Journey

Salju (free)

Tumble Ten (free)

If you’re more interested in creating your own tumblog theme for WordPress, Digging Into WordPress has a great tutorial for doing just that, including the custom post type coding.

Tumblogging with Tumblr

Tumblr has grown into a huge community, with nearly 12 billion posts, over 32 million tumblogs, and more than 39 millions posts per day. It’s definitely the most popular dedicated tumblogging platform out there.

Some of the biggest advantages Tumblr has going for it is that it’s hosted and free. All you have to do is add content. There are plenty of free themes for Tumblr, and the ability to customize your CSS and HTML to create your own theme.

Tumlbr also has the added advantage of a vibrant community surrounding it. Finding content on Tumblr is simple, because you can follow other Tumblogs and reblog their content if you so choose. People can also reblog and like your content. This community is something that a self-hosted tumblog on WordPress doesn’t have (and likely never will have). So if you want to be involved in a tumblogging community, Tumblr is really your best option.

Tumblr Goodies

One nice thing Tumblr offers is a page of “Goodies”. These include apps for mobile devices (they have iPhone, Blackberry, and Android apps), as well as a backup utility for Mac, a Facebook application, a Publish to Twitter option, and a Bookmarklet to make sharing to Tumblr easier.

Disadvantages of Tumblr

The biggest disadvantage to Tumblr is that you’re at the whim of the Tumblr platform. Tumblr has developed a bit of a reputation for downtime, though it seems to have cleared up in recent months. This isn’t usually as much of an issue with a self-hosted solution (as long as you have a good web host).

The other issue that arises from a hosted platform like Tumblr is that you don’t have final control over your content. If Tumblr suddenly shuts down, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to recover any of your content. If their policies change and your Tumblog suddenly violates those policies, they can shut you down without warning. This is why backing up your Tumblr content is important, so that you’ll still have a copy of everything in the event something should happen.

The wildcard: Posterous

There’s one service we haven’t talked about that’s often overlooked in the world of tumblogging: Posterous.

Posterous is a simple blogging platform that works a little bit different than most. Rather than posting from a dashboard or similar interface, posting is mostly done via email (though they also offer a dashboard for posting and mobile apps for both iOS and Android).

In September 2011 Posterous introduced “Posterous Spaces”, a new take on the tumblog. They now offer more fine-tuned privacy controls so you can post publicly or privately. All of the original functionality of Posterous was maintained, but additional functionality was also added along with some new themes. It’s now a cross between a tumblog and a social network, which may be appealing to some users.

Posterous Spaces also allows users to create multiple Spaces that can be set to public or private, and shared with just the people you want. In a way, it combines the features of Tumblr with those of Google+. Like Tumblr, Posterous has the advantages and disadvantages inherent in a free, hosted service.

If you’re new to tumblogging, Posterous is definitely worth checking out.

Conclusion

Tumblogging is a great way to post quick updates when you don’t have the time or the inclination for regular blogging.

It’s often more casual than a regular blog, more personal, or more granular than a “real” blog. And because of that, it occupies its own space on the web and its own part in our online lives.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each platform, ones that you’ll have to weigh for yourself to see which service best fits what you’re looking for.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Do you use any of the platforms above for your tumblog? Which one is your favorite? Let us know in the comments!

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The problem is, they are a pain to keep up. Sure we all start off well. We launch our blog with one or two posts in mind. However, we quickly give up and the site is left to stagnate.

The problem is twofold: One, we run out of material worth writing about. Two, writing posts is a painful process.

What then, should we do? We know that posting a few times a year really isn’t worthwhile and yet we struggle to do anything more.

Fortunately it doesn’t need to be this way. Blogging can flow easily if you can just start and maintain your stride. Let me show you how.

Getting started

For many the hardest part of blogging is getting started. In most cases this initial barrier is due to at least one of two reasons:

• A feeling of inadequacy.
• A lack of inspiration.

These are the most common reasons I hear for not blogging and so need addressing if you are going to become a prolific blogger. Therefore let’s begin by overcoming a lack of confidence.

Overcoming inadequacy

It amazes me how often I come across people who feel unable to blog because of their own inadequacies. Two of the most common expressions of this are:

1. I don’t know enough to blog. I am not an expert.

2. Nobody will be interested in what I have to say.

In truth, neither of these arguments hold water. First, there are always people who know less than you. Even those who do often like to read about somebody else’s view to confirm that they are doing things right.

Second, I think it is almost impossible for us to tell what others will be interested in. What seems mundane to us can be of interest to others. However, in most cases these arguments are symptoms of an underlying fear:

People might criticize me.

This is the heart of the matter. By blogging we are opening ourselves up to criticism and that terrifies us. The truth is that you will be criticized. Everybody is. Even the most well respected and popular bloggers get criticized. In fact often the more popular the blogger, the more criticism they receive.

However, the fact that everybody receives this kind of criticism actually makes it a non issue. If all bloggers receive criticism then you will be no better or worse than anybody else. You shouldn’t let that fear hold you back.

Even when you overcome your fears about blogging, you still need to deal with the second issue: finding inspiration.

Finding inspiration

One of the most common questions I have is, “how do you come up with topics to blog about?” It’s not an altogether surprising question since I write for a number of web design blogs as well as my own and record daily audio posts.

Although many people seem paralyzed when it comes to thinking of topics, it really isn’t that hard. In fact I have more topics than I will ever have time to write. Its just a matter of knowing how to nurture ideas.

The technique I use is simple. Whatever I am doing, I ask myself whether it is worth blogging. Every hour of everyday you are working on things worth blogging about. You just need to open your eyes and recognize the opportunities.

Take this post. My wife was commenting on how I always blogged in the same way and we got chatting about the process. At one point in the conversation I mentioned how I was always keeping an eye out for topics and I realized this very discussion was in actual fact a good post.

Whether you are spending the day bug fixing in IE or getting frustrated with a client who won’t sign off on a design, there is a blog post in it. You just have to train your brain to seek out these opportunities.

One way of doing this is to have a tabloid editor in your head narrating your life in newspaper headlines. e.g. “The fear and frustration of IE testing” or “Client pushes designer to murder.” I know it’s silly, but it does help focus you on turning your working life into a story.

Once you have the topic and the confidence to start, the next challenge is to actually write something.

How to actually get the post written

Writing a post can feel overwhelming at times. It is hard to know where to begin and can simply feel like hard work.

The first thing to say is your posts don’t need to be long. Neither does every post need to read like it was written by Shakespeare. Look at the incredibly popular blog Daring Fireball. John Grubber’s posts range from a couple of sentences to thousands of words. Some are his original thoughts, while others are mostly quotes from elsewhere. When it comes to blogging there are no rules. The key is just to get writing.

Not all blog posts need to be long. Take the posts at Daring Fireball. They vary massively in length.

However, for sake of argument lets say you did want to write something substantial like this post. Having a process to work through helps break the job down into more manageable chunks.

For me that process begins by writing an outline.

Create an outline

One of the hardest parts of writing a blog post is the first few sentences. When faced with an empty document it can be hard to know where to start. The best way to avoid this problem is not to start with an empty document at all. Instead I begin the process by creating an outline.

By mapping the structure of your post, including headings and the main points you need to communicate within each section, things become easier when you sit down to start writing.

Evernote is a great tool for organizing your posts and creating outlines.

You can use any tool for creating an outline. However, personally I find Evernote excellent for this kind of work. This is because the best time to write an outline for your post is the moment the idea comes to you. This is rarely when you’re sitting in front of a computer. Because Evernote is available on pretty much every platform including your iPhone or Android mobile, you can easily put together an outline wherever you are. It will automatically send those notes to your desktop computer where it will be available when you start writing.

With your outline in hand it is now much easier to start the process of writing your initial draft.

Just write

When it comes time to write your article, I would highly recommend just writing with no concern for grammar, spelling, or the readability of your post. The initial draft should be about getting your ideas down on paper as quickly as possible.

Another tip if you are trying to write an article of reasonable length, is not to write the whole thing in one sitting. With your outline in place it is a trivial matter to address one section at a time. Taking a break between each section not only makes the process less arduous, it also provides an opportunity for your subconscious to consider what should be written next.

For me there are two indispensable tools I use for writing these initial drafts. The first is a distraction-free writing tool called ByWord. Having a clean user interface focuses me on the writing process and prevents me from getting distracted by things like e-mail or twitter. The reason I particularly like ByWord over the competition is that it also supports Markdown and will export as HTML.

My second indispensable tool is Dragon Dictate for the Mac (there is also a PC version produced by the same company). When writing an initial draft I find that dictating the article is both quicker and helps maintain the informal, human tone that most blog posts require.

Dragon Dictate allows me to dictate my posts. This speeds up the initial draft and ensures a conversational tone.

With the initial draft complete, the next step is to craft your rambling thoughts into a more readable document.

Get critical and edit

There is nothing magical about the editing process. It simply involves reading through the document making corrections as you go.

The obvious place to start is with grammar and spelling. However, the style and flow of a document is important, too. I am no copywriter, but I do endeavor to make my posts as easy to read as possible. That involves removing unnecessary words, keeping sentences short and ensuring language is simple.

One approach I have found particularly useful is to read the post out loud. I seem to catch a lot more errors and spot where the document doesn’t flow well.

Ivona is one of many text to speech services that can be used to read back your blog posts.

I have also started using the text to speech feature built into my mac to read the document back to me. By reading along with the computer voice I find it easier to spot problems.

Finally, I also run my post through polishmywriting.com which analyzes my posts for grammar and style improvements. They also offer a WordPress plugin for those of you who use that blogging platform.

Polish my writing (also known as ‘After the Deadline’ is a great tool for tightening up your writing.)

By this stage your post should be looking in good shape. However, you are not done yet.

Finishing things off

Once you are done editing I suggest a final read through. This will pick up on any new errors that have crept in but also provides a chance to add appropriate imagery or links to other sites.

It is also the point where I markup my post ready for publishing. As I said earlier, I tend to markup using markdown rather than HTML. It is quicker to write and doesn’t make the document as hard to read. However, this is just a personal preference.

Markdown is an easy way to format posts that can be later converted to HTML.

Include imagery wherever possible. It makes the post more engaging and I have found image heavy posts get shared more. However, do not add imagery for imagery sake. Only use it when it adds value to the post.

I find that Flickr images marked with creative commons licensing can be a good source of imagery. However, I also use a lot of screenshots. If you are mac based check out Skitch and Little Snapper for taking screen grabs. Skitch makes capturing and uploading easier but Little Snapper has nicer annotation tools.

Both Little Snapper and Skitch are superb programs for quickly grabbing screenshots and uploading them to the web.

Growing in confidence

Hopefully this post has encouraged you in your blogging endeavors. It is so easy to give up because of confidence, lack of ideas and just feeling overwhelmed by the entire process.

However with time and practice, blogging can become second nature and you will easily be able to turn out quality posts with relatively little effort.

Written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Paul Boag. He is the founder of the UK Web design agency Headscape, author of the Website Owners Manual and host of award-winning Web design podcast Boagworld.com. He is also addicted to Twitter.

No doubt some of you reading this are prolific bloggers already and more experienced than me. If that is you please take the time to share your own experiences in the comments. I am sure those struggling to keep on blogging would appreciate all the advice they can get.

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Blogs are great if you use them for their original purpose. However, we often use them for a lot more than a chronological series of posts that have a short shelf life.

Take this website. The articles posted here are a valuable resource and yet, like most blogs, when they have slipped off the front page few will ever read them again.

This is the heart of the problem. Despite attempts to use categories and tags, most content posted to a blog is lost in the ever-growing archive. This is such a waste both from the perspective of the user, who is missing out on valuable advice, and the website owner who has low page views and high bounce rates.

This is a problem I face on my blog and so I decided to research possible ways of solving the problem. What follows is a list of the most effective techniques I discovered from reviewing other sites.

Making featured more than just recent

Traditionally the featured posts on the homepage of your blog are the most recent. This works well if you produce regular posts. However, many of us may only post once or twice a week.

If this is the case for you it provides an opportunity to use that featured area for more than the latest post. Why not highlight older posts that deserve being featured again?

A List Apart doesn’t just feature the latest post. They also feature older posts on its homepage.

This kills two birds with one stone. First, it allows you to showcase older posts. Second, it makes the site look a lot more active than it is, so encouraging people to call back more often. As well as featuring recent and noteworthy posts on your homepage, you might also want to consider highlighting popular posts.

Popular posts

Every blog has a handful of posts which seem to consistently drive traffic. These “killer posts” are the ones that get linked to, tweeted about, and generally feature well in search engines.

Webdesigner Depot uses popular posts to draw us deeper into the site.

Although it would be perfectly possible to highlight these posts using the featured post technique I mention above, why not go a step further and create a dedicated “popular post” area either on your homepage or even in your sidebar? While we are highlighting things on our homepage, lets look at adding something for new users.

New users guide

People arriving on your blog for the first time will typically land on a specific post and read it. The question is: what then? How can you keep them and draw them in further.

One answer is to create a guide specifically for them. Something that introduces them to all that the site has to offer.

The upcoming redesign of boagworld.com will feature a section dedicated to introducing new users to site content.

This is an approach I’m using on the new version of my website. I take each of my main audiences and point out areas of the blog that would be of particular interest to them. This ranges from entire categories to specific posts. This is a great way to prove that your blog has added value and encourage them to dig deeper.

A similar approach to this would be theme posts.

Theme posts

A new user guide targets a specific group, where theme posts target those interested in a specific subject area.

The chances are, if you have blogged for a few years you have accumulated a number of posts on related topics. For example, if you are a front end developer you might have written half a dozen posts or more on various aspects of CSS3.

Problogger.net organizes many of its posts into a series of themes on a particular subject.

By going back through your archive of old posts, it is relatively easy to find these themes. The next step is to write a new entry that draws together this content from your archive into a “theme post” giving your readers a whistle-stop tour of all that you have written on a certain subject.

Make sure you remember to reference these theme posts in the included articles so encouraging people to explore these related subjects. Speaking of related posts…

Related posts

Related posts are possibly the most common way of encouraging users to explore your archive. This is probably because so many plugins exist that offer the functionality, not because they are the most effective tool.

Similar Posts is just one of many WordPress plugins that provide related post functionality.

That said, they are certainly worth adding to your site. A simple list is one way to go. However, I have also seen much more eye-catching implementations that include an image.

Webdesigner Depot draws the user’s eye to related posts by associating an image with each one.

But why stop at related posts? What about showing other posts by the same author?

Other posts by this author

Obviously, this is only applicable on websites who have multiple authors. However if that is your website, then showing off posts from the archive by the same author is a great way of highlighting old content and helping the user to get to know your contributors better.

Smashing Magazine lists all the posts by a particular author on an author’s profile page.

In my experience this works particularly well when associated with a photo and short bio on the author in question.

The author is not the only piece of meta data associated with a post. We also know what category it is found within.

Making more of your categories

I always think that category lists are massively under utilized on most blogs, especially considering how prominent they are.

Most blogs have categories listed in their sidebar and each post provides a link to the category it is apart of.

However, despite these prominent links, the statistics I have seen show few users actually navigate via category. Why is this? I suspect it is because the category pages themselves are normally of little use.

A long list of blog posts does nothing to encourage users towards good content.

Category pages are almost always lists of posts sorted chronologically. There is little weighting and the user is left to wade through large numbers of posts normally within a broad category.

A better way would be to give more guidance to users about where to start. This could involve highlighting featured posts as we proposed on the homepage or organizing these posts into further specific sub-category.

Of course even if you have the best category pages in the world many users won’t click on them because they expect a poor experience.

One answer to this problem would be to enhance the list of categories in the sidebar by adding a featured post from each category. This exposes the user to more quality content while at the same time indicating that their experience might differ from the norm.

Not that categories are the only way of organizing posts. There are also tags.

A better use of tags

Tags have so much potential as a way of encouraging users to explore old posts, but too often they are reduced to a tag cloud that few look at.

Some blogs attempt to solve this problem by displaying tags associated with a post at the end of the article. Unfortunately this area has so many calls to action—from commenting to sharing on social networks—that tags are often lost in the noise.

One solution is to auto link tags as they appear in the copy instead of being bunched at the end. As the user is reading the copy they may well be tempted to explore other posts that contain the same keywords.

Auto Link Best Tags is just one of many WordPress plugins that help you make better use of your post tags.

The experience could be further enhanced with a bit of Javascript that could popup tooltips on rollover of tag links. This would display a few select posts marked with that tag.

This all depends on tagging your posts well. However, there is good reason to do so because it improves search results.

Better search

One of the biggest boundaries to users exploring old content on your blog is probably the search functionality. This is because generally speaking the default search capability of most blogging platforms is poor.

The limitations of default search comes in two forms. First, many of them only offer very basic search parameters. Second, the results returned often do not highlight keyword phrases leaving users wondering why a particular post appears.

Relevanssi is a superb WordPress plugin that will super charge the search on your blog.

Fortunately, there are no shortage of alternatives out there from Google site search to WordPress plugins.

Finally, there is a design issue with search. Most blog templates reduce search the sidelines which does nothing to urge users to engage with it. If you want users to explore your archive a good starting point would be to place search front and center in your design.

Perhaps it is time to give your search box more prominence.

So much potential

Blogs have had an enormous impact on the web, but so much of their value is lost, buried as it is in the depths of an archive.

In this post I have tried to urge you to start thinking about how to liberate that lost content. However, the few ideas I have shared are just the beginning. There are opportunities to use everything from email newsletters to “this time last year posts” to show users the depth and breadth of content you can offer.

Written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Paul Boag. He is the founder of the UK Web design agency Headscape, author of the Website Owners Manual and host of award-winning Web design podcast Boagworld.com. He is also addicted to Twitter.

Let’s use the comments to discuss these various ideas and maybe think of some other ways of encouraging users to navigate beyond the front page of our blogs.

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However, the most successful bloggers will say that collating these figures is not what’s important; rather, creating a community around a blog is the essential part.

The first step to creating this community is to attract high-quality comments.

To help you do this, we’ve laid out some key factors to keep in mind. If you have others in mind, please suggest them in the comments below…

Engaging Readers Through Content

This is the most important step. Unengaging content will not generate comments, no matter how many plug-ins or theme hacks you implement on your blog.

Ask Open Questions
People love to give their opinion and share their knowledge on specific topics. Give them the opportunity to do so by asking open questions like, “What do you think of the MySpace logo redesign?” or “Which software would you recommend for invoicing and why?” You’ll get more feedback from this than from inspiration posts or simple articles, and maybe you’ll learn something, too.

Write Controversial Articles
This is a sure way to get comments, but be delicate. If you have a strong opinion on a topic, be bold and write away. That said, don’t be insulting or make every post controversial, which would be tiring for all participants. Finally, know your limits to avoid potential lawsuits.

Managing Comments

Keep comments under control, and be cautious of spam. The following should be helpful with this.

Reply to Comments
Visitors who make the effort to leave a comment appreciate recognition. Replying to all comments, at least those that deserve a reply, is encouraging and shows cares, and it increases the likelihood of future interaction with readers.

Fight Spam
Set up Akismet on your blog. The plug-in will rid your blog of most spam and save you time on moderating. In the past year alone, Akismet has saved me from 76,000 spams comments; if you factor in manual deletion at 3 seconds per spam comment, that’s about 633 hours. Also, make sure to regularly check the spam section of your blog’s comment management area to look for false positives.

Moderate Comments Effectively
While Akismet works quite well, it doesn’t detect every type of spam, nor can it sniff out every type of troll. Finally, never let people start flame-wars in your comment section.

Have a Comment Policy
While you don’t necessarily have to write one, letting viewers know what is acceptable on your blog is good practice. Be prepared to handle any situation that may arise, and stick with whatever policy you establish; this will save you time in the end.

Close Comments on Old Posts
Leaving the comments area on old posts active requires much more maintenance and isn’t a good idea if you want to keep everything clean. To close comments on old posts, in the WordPress admin area, go to Settings → Discussion → Other Comment Settings, and check the box for “Automatically close comments older than ×× days” (filling in the desired time limit). By popular choice, 14 days seems to be a good deadline.

Promote Active Commenters

No matter how useful your articles, blog readers who take action after reading one are in the minority. Show them some love, and make sure they have incentives to comment again in future.

Display Recent Comments in the Sidebar
Expose the latest comments to point out articles that are currently active, and also to show who is participating in the conversation. This is fairly easy to do, but if you are not comfortable hacking your WordPress theme, then you can use this plug-in.

Reward Good Comments
There are several ways to reward good comments. You can send the author an email of congratulations, quote their comment in a blog post or simply retweet what they wrote. If your readers know that there might be a reward for commenting, then they will more likely take the time to craft their thoughts.

Show a List of Top Commenters
Listing top commenters in your sidebar is another way to show appreciation, and it encourages others to comment. There is a plug-in for that, too.

Encourage Interaction Among Commenters

Getting reactions to articles is great, but getting readers to interact with each another is even better. It is the best way to generate discussion and create a real sense of community.

Set-Up WordPress Threaded Comments
Threaded comments will enable in-depth conversations to build in your comment area. With WordPress 2.7, this feature is built in, although you must still activate it if your theme doesn’t support it. Setting it up can be a bit tricky, but Otto Destruct has a good tutorial.

Install a Comment Rating System
An awesome commenting system is what helped Reddit to become so successful. With a similar system on your blog, readers will be doing part of the moderation work for you. WordPress has a great plug-in if you want this feature on your blog: Comment Rating.

Let Readers Quote Each Other
The Quote Comment plug-in will assist commenters to quote directly from a discussion thread.

Make Your Comments Area Sticky

Enlisting regular commenters is the best way to keep a discussion moving. Below are some tools to help.

Comment Subscriptions
Let commenters know when a reply has been posted on one of their comments. This will bring them back to your website to contribute further. The conversation will really develop with this plug-in on your blog.

Display an RSS Feed for Comments
This feature has been built in to WordPress for a long time, but it is not displayed in every theme. If your theme doesn’t include it, you can follow these steps to provide an RSS feed for each post’s comments.

Thank Commentators
The WordPress plug-in “Thank Me Later” automatically sends an email to readers after they write their first comment on your blog. Used as is, I find it to be a bit invasive. However, you could easily offer a freebie that is accessible only through the email that would make things much friendlier.

Add dofollow to Comment Links
This plug-in will definitely bring commenters back, especially if they are bloggers who are looking for link juice to their own website. But be careful, because it will probably also attract spam. To implement it, check out the DoFollow plug-in.

Make the Comments Area Attractive

In addition to all of these tips, improving the UI of the comments area is also important and will make comments more readable.

Different Layout for Author’s Comments
Distinguishing between the statuses of commenters will make this section more scannable, and it will show readers that you are participating in the conversation. Setting this up is fairly easy. Just tweak your comments’ PHP file; Matt Cutts explains how.

Display Avatars
Avatars let readers show a bit of themselves on your blog. There are two popular ways to add avatars in WordPress: Gravatar and Twitter. The WordPress Codex explains how to set up Gravatars, and Smashing Magazine goes over Twitter avatars.

Separate Comments From Pingbacks
Pingbacks show that your blog is connected to other blogs and is therefore popular. However, they can also interfere and make the conversation stream less readable. I’d suggest removing pingbacks from the body of the comments and grouping them together at the end. This tutorial explains how to do that.

For professional WordPress Themes, check out Elegant Themes

Written and compiled exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Mirko Humbert. Mirko is a graphic and web designer and blogger from Switzerland. When he is not working for his clients, he blogs on Designer Daily and Typography Daily.

How do you attract more comments on your blog? What type of comments do you appreciate most?

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We all have our designer, developer and client hats on as we surf blogs such as this one, but many of us are also bloggers. Anyone can be a blogger, but not every blogger improves the quality of content on the Internet.

A successful blog is the result of a lot of hard work by the blogger(s) who run it. The extent of its success depends on the blog’s style, its content, its focus on its core subject matter, as well as its marketing and publicity.

It is time to look at the 7 different types of bloggers who contribute to the quality of the web in the hope of creating an engaging and entertaining playground for all.

1. The Controversial Opportunist

The latest news and hottest topics are the controversial opportunist’s thing.

A talented researcher, he stays on top of the competition by knowing what everyone else is blogging about and by keeping a close eye on the latest news and gossip.

The moment a piece of information hits the general public, he quickly produces similar content to ride on the wave of popularity, or he tries to be contentious and stand out from the crowd by challenging it.

The controversial opportunist cleverly plays on the popularity of information by adding just the right amount of spin, but without getting into trouble for it. He dabbles in risky business but likes to tango with the dark side in order to be provocative.

Although he is accused of not having a mind of his own, one has to give him credit for being able to swoop in quickly and find an interesting way to stimulate thought and controversy.

“Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
– Demosthenes

2. The Self-Indulger

Placing little importance on public opinion, the self-indulger plays God on his blog.

He carefully filters what he shares with the public. His blog is merely for self-entertainment, an avenue to share his thoughts and opinions without the pressure of deadlines; a personal diary of sorts.

Fame is inconsequential to him, and revenue is a non-issue. For the self-indulger, if you don’t like what you see, so be it. Blogging is a personal exercise, and he has the right to freedom of speech, so “please keep your comments to yourself, thank you very much.”

And yet, the self-indulger often attracts attention, even though he has a blog that no one really follows or learns from. He is instantly recognizable at conferences and meet-ups, and yet no one knows exactly what they like about him. He’s famous merely for being famous.

3. The Deceitful Bandit

Repackaging is the deceitful bandit’s forte. He is cunning and manipulative. Able to cleverly rephrase and restructure words slightly differently to pass off as his own work, he does not give credit to the original source, unless he gets caught red-handed.

His brazen freeloading does not stop with text; he even pulls images from other websites. Despite this, he does not shy away from public visibility, and he is unabashed in promoting his blog and creating link-bait and spam ambushes.

The deceitful bandit may come across as credible, but he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He hides his motives well until he is ready to steal from his unsuspecting victims.

In order to maximize his catch, he casts a wide net over many blogs to reel in good content. Fast and lethal, he is like a hungry cheetah in the wild. Once he’s got his eye on the prize, the prey is not likely to escape unscathed.

“The winner is the chef who takes the same ingredients as everyone else and produces the best results.” – Edward de Bono

4. The Leeching Mercenary

Taking a page out of Jerry Maguire’s book, “Show me the money!” is probably the leeching mercenary’s favorite line. He goes where the money is.

The name suits him because he leeches off of the fame and success of prominent blogs by guest writing on them more regularly than on his own. His puts his blog in the back seat in order to help other blogs grow.

In fact, guest blogging could become his primary occupation, perhaps becoming a full-time profession. Despite the fact that he contributes to the community, though, no one likes a leech.

That isn’t to say that the leeching mercenary’s work is not up to standard or good enough to earn a decent living. However, he has chosen to take short cuts in the hope of gaining instant fame and success. Before you can conquer others, you must first conquer yourself; after all, you are your greatest enemy and ally.

One cannot leech off others forever; and without a well-maintained blog of his own, the leeching mercenary will not be able to survive long in this way.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”
Thomas Jefferson

5. The Zealous Evangelist

Passionate and overenthusiastic, the zealous evangelist goes on and on about topics that he vehemently believes in. However, blind faith doesn’t always serve him well.

The content may be beautifully written and rich, but the logic and substance may be lacking. He skims the tip of the iceberg but doesn’t care to explore its depths. He avoids any perspective that challenges his ideas or content.

He is hardworking and determined, constantly promoting his content, hoping to convince others of his ways and gain more followers. But the zealous evangelist can come across as pushy and irrationally stubborn because he is so set in his beliefs. He does not consider other people’s ideas if they challenge his. His passion might even hinder his ability to think logically and could cause friction with others.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh weak. He believes he can help or teach others, but he might not actually have the ability to do so well. His content, though serious and with merit, can come across as biased and can thus impede discussion, becoming boring and stale.

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
– Albert Schweitzer

6. The Influential Wordsmith

Respected and influential, his content is highly regarded, without necessarily being fanciful or well designed. The influential wordsmith is able to captivate his audience and initiate thoughtful discourse. Everyone wants a piece of him. He is invited to every conference, and everyone wants to guest blog for him.

This respect is well deserved. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; he treats the community like family, freely offers help and shares his philosophy openly. His love and respect for the community is the reason why he is loved and respected in return.

He is wise and humble. He captivates his audience when he speaks. But he is not without flaws. Occasionally, even the influential wordsmith will take a wrong turn. But he does not shrink from responsibility, and he will graciously and sincerely admit to his mistakes. In turn, people forgive and forget. His honesty and righteousness are the reason why everyone trusts him; he proves time and again that he is without a hidden agenda.

“Seek to understand then to be understood.”
– Stephen Covey

7. The Quality Supplier

A quick thinker, the quality supplier is astute and capable of understanding what the reader needs and wants most.

Forward-thinking, he is able to race ahead of the controversial opportunist and provide rich and resourceful material to his audience. Rather than force others to accept his ideas, he presents his material in an unbiased way and helps the community to make informed choices by allowing them to look objectively at both sides of the coin. His deferential manner allows readers to think for themselves and to make decisions based on their own preferences.

With a wealth of knowledge, the quality supplier generously provides readers with information and is patient with their concerns and questions. One could say he is a guru in his niche market.

Without complaining, he works tirelessly to improve his blog, to the point of obsession. He aims to offer tips 24/7 for the benefit of readers. Their enjoyment is his payment for all the hard work he puts into his blog; the rest is inconsequential.

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
– Thomas Edison

Many variables contribute to the kinds of bloggers we become. Age, personal circumstances and even our main job all affect the way we think and write.

Written exclusively for Webdesigner Depot by Aidan Huang, a freelance developer, designer and ingenious blogger. He is one of the editors-in-chief at Onextrapixel. Follow him on Twitter @AidanOXP

What kind of blogger are you? Are you a combination of the seven mentioned in this article? Share with us your thoughts in the comments below; after all, intelligent discourse is the ultimate aim.

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It’s a remarkable achievement for a design-based product, particularly given the industry. Here is a theme-not a platform, but a theme-beating many of the world’s leading independent design firms in revenue, all through passive sales.

This means that the design industry no longer offers only services, but also offers products to its own designers and developers.

While the industry has held many opportunities for work, a designer’s pay has traditionally been based on hours rendered and total output. Pearson has achieved a breakthrough with this theme, cementing the immense value of design-based products.

The term “paradigm shift” is thrown around too often in business articles. But Thesis has truly changed the way designers view their work and allot their time.

Hundreds of developers are now productizing their work and creating assets that earn passive income for them, thus freeing up the time they have for other online projects.

I’ve studied Thesis to pinpoint the factors that have led to its success. From its flexible code to lucrative affiliate programs, there are eight main elements behind the theme’s skyrocketing sales.

If you would like to replicate the theme’s success as an online product, these eight observations would no doubt prove helpful.

1. Make Your Product Flexible and Versatile

Take one look at Thesis and you’ll see why it’s so popular. The theme is simple, flexible and versatile enough to work as part of any website. It’s a classic do-all utility priced far below its actual value to most designers.

You could price a niche product as ludicrously as you like and still make a few sales. Buyers are waiting at any price range, no matter how niche the product.

But in order to market your theme to the thousands, you need to create something any designer would find value in. Versatility is a must: create something powerful that also appeals to a wide audience.

2. Use Effective, Clear and Tech-Based Marketing

Selling to designers is difficult, and selling to developers is even harder. Developers are used to building their own tools and coding their own themes.

Paying for something that they could create themselves does not seem right to them. Thesis beats this anti-spending mindset quite interestingly.

First, it uses a clear tech-based marketing message to capture the attention of designers. The theme is marketed on its simplicity and versatility, and it employs just the right amount of jargon to enamor developers.

Most products can’t be marketed like this, but tools geared to a technical audience tend to sell better when built around concrete figures and technical features.

3. Understand Your Audience

As an entrepreneurial developer, Chris Pearson understood the value of appealing to his audience.

Unlike other developers who will use almost any channel to advertise their product, Chris Pearson relied on his audience to spread the word and make Thesis a smashing success.

He also provided a forum for support and formed a community, which made the theme central to the work of many WordPress developers.

Those looking to productize a service need to understand what their audience is looking for. The most effective WordPress themes sell because of fanatical support and fantastic service, as well as a large and influential developer community.

Create a product and a community resource that developers love and you’ll have little trouble marketing the product.

4. Use an Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are a mixed bag, particularly when it comes to design-based products. While the sales benefit of an affiliate program is big-particularly when backed by high commissions-you risk hurting your reputation.

Many affiliates resort to nasty tactics to push your product, and your name and company could wind up being associated with them.

These risks can be minimized by using a tightly controlled affiliate scheme. Thousands of copies of Thesis have been sold through affiliate programs. Indeed, affiliate sales make up the bulk of the revenue. It’s truly an adapt-or-die scenario: to move even a small number of units, implementing an affiliate program is essential.

5. Avoid Tight Control

Pearson could have adopted Apple’s approach by limiting the ways in which people could tinker with his product to improve usability and performance. It’s an effective strategy for consumer-based products, but it’s not the right way to market to engineers.

To sell a product like Thesis, which is highly flexible, immensely powerful and built for people who love to tinker with settings, the creator has to make it versatile and unrestricted.

Consider your audience: if it consists of designers, then make the product more competitive by allowing customers to tweak and modify it.

6. Design Products That Make Companies Rich

As a designer, your job is to capitalize on every opportunity. When a client spots a gap in the market or an opportunity online, you’re the person they call. Fill this same role with your product. Your theme should help make other people rich.

Thesis does this by providing a simple framework for companies and marketers to build on. Other themes do it by giving companies a straightforward way to create a website. For your theme to sell even modestly, it needs to eliminate a barrier that’s preventing companies from making money.

7. Exploit Your Theme to Market Other Products

Most designers are familiar with the concept of a sales funnel. The web developer offers a selection of additional services to the client after completing an order.

Designers of successful themes use a sales funnel to build on their success, leading clients to new products and premium services.

If you’re going to release a product, consider its value as a cross-promotional tool. Many developers price their first product very affordably in the hope that it will enable them to collect email addresses, build a community and market future products.

8. Design for Businesses, Not Consumers

Most companies are willing to set aside a sizable budget for any service that will increase their revenue. They’re happy to spend big on products that bring in new business, help them make more money or simplify an otherwise time-consuming (and thus expensive) process.

Thesis is positioned as a product that saves companies time. Position your theme as a product that helps companies, not consumers, and you’ll gain access to a wide audience of people who don’t mind spending money where it counts.

For more professional WordPress Themes, check out Elegant Themes

For more information about this theme go to the Thesis Website

Written exclusively for WDD by Mathew Carpenter. He is an 18-year-old business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is currently working on Sofa Moolah, a website that teaches you how to make money online. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter. Follow Sofa Moolah on Twitter: @sofamoolah.

What do you think of Thesis and its business approach? How do you market your own themes? Please share your views below…

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Individuals and companies alike all wanted to get in on blogging, and they saw it as the best way to reach people.

Blogs about blogging sprouted up everywhere, telling people how to create better blogs, how to make money from their blogs, and how to get more traffic.

But has the blogosphere grown so large that there are, simply put, too many blogs out there?

Is blogging going to fall by the wayside in favor of other forms of user-generated content and social media? Where do blogs fit in the age of Twitter and Facebook?

How Big Is the Blogosphere, Anyway?

Getting a clear picture of the size of the blogosphere is difficult. WordPress has statistics for both WordPress.com (15.1 million blogs and counting) and self-hosted WordPress installations (17.4 million active installations), which gives part of the picture.

There are more than 10 million tumblogs on Tumblr. Blogger doesn’t offer any public statistics on how many blogs they host. Technorati is currently tracking more than 1.2 million blogs. And there are likely millions of other blogs out there hosted on other services like Movable Type, TypePad, Expression Engine, and other CMSs.

Conservatively, it would probably be safe to assume that there are over a hundred million active blogs out there. And more blogs are being created every day. A lot of people have multiple blogs, and plan to create more. And there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blogs out there that have been abandoned by their creators due to a lack of interest (or a lack of traffic).

Who’s Blogging?

There are three basic types of blogs out there, though there is often some overlap between the types on a lot of blogs.

The first type is the personal blog. These are blogs run by on person, and usually reflect their own views, activities, and unique outlook on life. In most cases, personal blogs aren’t written with the idea of making money directly, and most of these blogs fall into the category of only having a few hundred or maybe a thousand visitors each month. And usually, their authors aren’t too worried about their readership, as it’s more of a hobby than any kind of business activity (they blog because they want to).

Next are topic blogs. Virtually all of the most popular blogs online are topic blogs. These blogs are often run by more than one person, and focus on a particular subject or niche. A topic blog with good, unique content and active marketing can usually easily surpass the thousand-visitor-a-month benchmark, though many topic bloggers don’t bother putting the time and effort into their blogs that they need to get beyond that point.

Corporate blogs are the third type of blog. These blogs are run by a company as a secondary activity to their primary business. Some of these blogs are excellent, and come across more like topic or personal blogs than corporate ones. Others are nothing more than corporate spam, akin to a series of press releases that only talk about the company’s new offerings.

Hybrid blogs combine two or more of the other types of blogs. For example, if the CEO of a company has an official blog, that’s a hybrid of the corporate and personal blog models. A corporate blog that focuses on providing content on a specific topic is a hybrid of those two models. And a personal blog that focuses on a specific niche is a hybrid of the personal and topic blog models.

Content Overload

The problem with so many blogs is that readers are suffering from content overload. We only have so much time in a day to read blogs, and even if we limit our reading to a particular niche or topic, there are still way more blogs out there than we could ever hope to read.

This is one reason so many blogs are abandoned after a little while. It’s probably safe to say that most blogs never surpass roughly a thousand unique visitors each month, and many don’t even reach that level. It can be very discouraging to a blogger to plateau at a few hundred visitors each month. But each of these blogs is contributing to the feeling many users have of there simply being too many blogs out there.

Think about it: how many blogs do you currently subscribe to or read on a regular basis? Even avid blog readers out there probably don’t read more than a couple hundred blogs on a regular basis. And most of you likely don’t read more than a couple dozen with any kind of consistency. So why do you care if more blogs are created?

The Blogosphere as an Echo Chamber

Another common criticism of the blogosphere is that it’s little more than an echo chamber. And it’s an honest assessment when applied to the majority of blogs out there. A lot of blogs out there keep rehashing the same topics and the same arguments. A lot of them don’t create original content. Instead, they simply reblog what others have said, sometimes adding a line or two of commentary (and other times not even bothering to do that).

That portion of the blogosphere that is little more than an echo chamber provides little value to blog readers. And those are the blogs that rarely climb the ranks to become popular.

Not every blog is like that, though. It’s quite the contrary when you look at the most popular blogs out there in any given niche. Most of these blogs are providing useful commentary, new insight, and even breaking news ahead of mainstream media. The idea that the entire blogosphere is nothing but an echo chamber is not only false, but it’s the kind of argument old-media adherents cling to to try to discredit blogs and their authors.

Is There Room for New Blogs?

With a hundred million or more blogs out there already publishing regular updates, what more is there to be said? If the blogosphere is really this overcrowded, one can’t help wondering if there’s any room for new blogs?

The good news is that there’s always going to be plenty of room out there for new high-quality blogs. The bad news is that there are a lot more challenges facing bloggers now than there were a few years ago.

• It takes a huge investment in terms of both time and energy to create useful, original content, and then to get out there and promote that content to prospective readers. Because there are so many more things competing for reader attention than ever before, you really have to stand out to get noticed.
• Building a loyal readership and engaged fanbase is a slow process. When you’re starting out, you may have days when only a handful of people visit your blog, if anyone at all. Can you handle these kinds of ups and downs?
• Unless you become a very, very popular blog, and one with a tight focus and engaged readership, there’s very little money to be made blogging.
• Competition fierce, and with more blogs now resembling major media corporations, there isn’t as much of a “buddy-buddy” feeling in the blogosphere as there once was. Don’t expect a helping hand (though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t reach out to others in your niche anyway, as some bloggers out there are still happy to help out noobs).

Should You Start a New Blog?

With all that said, just because you want a blog doesn’t mean you should have one. There are plenty of other avenues for building an online following that don’t include traditional blogging.

For example, if your primary reason for starting a blog is to share cool information you find online related to a topic, you might be better off just setting up a Twitter account or a tumblog to share links. Blogs are better suited to original, long-form content.

Likewise, if you want to build a community, then why not just start with a community? Set up a social networking site or a group on an existing site. There are plenty of open-source, free, and low-cost tools out there to help you do those things.

If you’re still sure you want a blog, then make sure you have clear goals in mind when you get started. Know whether you’re blogging just as a hobby or for some other purpose. Produce high-quality content and then network like crazy to get that content in front of people.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

What are your thoughts on the state of the blogosphere? Is there still room for more blogs, or is it better to invest in other means of reaching people and sharing content? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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