Posted on June 8, 2008 - by John

Does ‘rattling on’ damage your blog?

Lorelle points out how frustrating it can be to find misleading post tittles on webfeeds and that those posts usually turn out to be “rattling-on posts” with no relevance to the title.

Of course this also causes mild annoyance to the Google searcher -finding search results with no actual relevance to the topic.While the problem seems to be more with the fact that the title can be misleading in that it never gets to the point, Lorelle has touched on a somewhat sensitive topics for some authors - we like to rant or ‘rattling-on’ a little.

Are these the most popular posts? Does a bear shi* in the woods?

I bet there are a ton of authors who are out and about, come across a predicament and think ‘I’ll rant about that tonight on my blog’, there’s nothing wrong with this, some posts are interesting, others are mind numbingly boring, but at the end of the day it’s your blog so enjoy, if people don’t want to read it move on, I tend to write a few “rattling-on posts” myself.

Below are a few ideas I came up with to prevent too many “rattling-on posts” which I wrote out for myself. Feel free to use or ignore these at will.

• Write about experiences of interest to you and your audience with a positive note, rather than moaning about an issue, although some times this is unavoidable, note what attracts you to your favourite blogs.
• A picture is worth a thousand words - no I don’t mean to put down the book and pick up some magazine rag - on many occasions a picture can say more than the words every could. Have your camera phone on the ready, pictures brighten you up your blog and helps attach a persona to it. The old saying is don’t judge a cover by its cover, but we all do this.
• This brings us to presentation, not so much the theme, we can all pick out the wonderful themes on the net, but keeping it tidy, all those  blog-plugins are great fun, but don’t try to cover up bad content with too many nick knacks.
• Use Google Reader - for inspiration.
• Subscribe to johnmryan.com’s blog - because your under my mind control.

I did say it was just a few ideas, feel free to comment in your own ideas on keeping your blog interesting and I’ll update this post if there any good ones.

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