becoming better blogger when I write about diverse topics

Question

I often tend to treat my blog as my diary and thereby end up having a mix up personal and general blogs on my site. I understand that it does not attract readers - a mixed bag of one liner and articles dwindling between different arenas.

I am a blogger by choice and the content of my writing has got absolutely nothing to do with my profession. I am working on becoming a better blogger, where the blog serves as a general portfolio of my thought process on several social and philosophical issues, as well as those from day-to-day life. My target audience is people in their late 20 or 30's, and I am particularly interested in writing about modern day lifestyle and philosophy - how our lives and thoughts are changing or not-changing with the rapid pace of life. For instance, our lives revolve around social media, mobile devices and fast food - but how are they impacting our rudimentary self as a person? What are our dreams and what is the root of depression for many around that age? But my blog seems somewhat undisciplined and more of a personal philosophy than a neutral well-researched article. Besides, I do write light-hearted articles on something like coffee, conversations, travel, books, and some of them are appreciated as good reads. But my writing style some times tend to become slightly dark than amusing on such topics as well.

What are some thoughts towards this extent that can be adopted to make my blog contents more appealing and meaningful.

Precisely, I am looking for some personal practices / discipline that bloggers follow that helped them become a better blogger.

Answer 1

In my experience there are two main types of blogs out there, topic-focused and person-focused. You're describing the latter.

Person-focused blogs, which cover a range of topics and styles with the unifying theme of "interesting enough for the blog author to want to write about", seem to attract a smaller audience unless you're famous. That's ok; not everybody is trying to hit the big leagues. Your followers will be some combination of people who know you and people whose areas of interest overlap with yours enough that they're willing to skip past the stuff they're not interested in.

A key tool for increasing the size of the latter group is tags. I read a bunch of this type of blog, and if the tagging tells me up front that this post is about World of Warcraft or Python or Dancing With the Stars, I know to just skip it. Blogs that don't use tags (and/or good subject lines) have to have a higher density of interesting posts for me to read. Put another way: what are you asking people to wade through to get to the good stuff, when everyone's definition of "the good stuff" is different? Make it easy and you'll more-easily attract casual readers.