Focus is a word that is so essential to blogging–it’s a word that will make or break you if you want to not only succeed in blogging, but truly enjoy it.

Let’s start with my blog’s focus: culture and theology: hand in hand. Now, that seems really wordy, and a bit on the weird side. Not really that cool, but it works for me, and when people say it, I want them to immedietly think of Agent Tim Online. The meaning of it is simple: I take issues and events that are affecting our culture and look at them in the light of God’s Word, applying the truth of the Bible to everything, and showing what God says about what’s going on. I try to stay close to this as much as possible, only leaning a little bit every once in awhile.

Now, we need to examine a blog that is somewhat “opposite” of mine (don’t worry, you’re blog is not listed.) The blog we’re examining is Wake Up the NEA, which, really, is a great blog in need of some help, which I am going to try to give to it. This will help us as it gives everyone a chance to look at a “blog revival” and how to make a blog with 5 visits jump to 50 or above in a certain time period (still to be found in our experience together).

Vital Stats: Visits

Total 900
Average Per Day 5
Average Visit Length 1:53

Examination Time…

1.) What is the purpose of this blog? Well, a quick look at it tells us it’s about “waking up the NEA.” But how? How does it wake up the NEA? What actions is it taking? How is it unique? What does it offer to you as a reader? How will you benefit from reading?

2.) What are the good things about this blog?
a.) I see a place to contact the writer. Great place to start.
b.) A nice blogroll that seems pretty well established.
c.) It offers some unique graphics. Great plus.
d.) I like the fairly-well formatted posts. They don’t look hard to read.

3.) Stats? Well, this blog used to have quite a few visitors, but has gone down significantly, as no one has posted in a few months. I’m going to be attempting to turn things around, in a “Extreme Makeover” kind of way, taking this blog from the pits to, hopefully, heaven, giving you the steps to make your blog work as well. So…here we go.

Where to start?

Well, content is, of course, essential to the blog. But, as I said, the content must fit the purpose of the blog. So, first, let’s define the focus of Wake Up The NEA.

Purpose: To give the National Education Association a wake-up call by providing a place where you can see the misdemeanors by the NEA exposed, respond to them on the blog, and have the opportunity to react by sending the NEA letters, emails, and making phone calls. This blog also pushes for a reform in the public schools, and allows public school teachers to express their dislike for the NEA.

So far, it sounds great. It can be placed on the sidebar somewhere, or it can just be a guidline for the writer for the time being.

Now, since we’ve assessed the blog, we can begin from the ground, thinking about the goals, and how they’ll fit in. We need to look at the writer’s, the software, advertising, the template, the possibility of adding categories, and it’s feeds. These are all essential to the success of the blog. But before we delve into the thick of things, we need to go over blogging 101.

The number one question is “what is a blog.” According to Technorati, a wonderful source for bloggers, a blog is defined as “personal journal on the Web. Weblogs cover as many different topics, and express as many opinions, as there are people writing them. Some blogs are highly influential and have enormous readership, while others are mainly intended for a close circle of family and friends.”

Of course, the wonderful thing about technorati is that their defintion of “blog” doesn’t end there. They go on to describe the common misconceptions about weblogs.

“The main misconception about blogs is that they are only personal diaries. Weblogs come in all flavors, from personal journals that are mainly shared with close friends and family, to blogs with readership levels placing them in the league of mainstream media. Blog topics include political commentary, product reviews, scientific endeavors, and any area of information where people have a deep expertise and a desire to express it.”

Now, you’re looking at a blog, so a lot of what I could describe to you can already see in front of you. But some things may confuse you.

Comments: Comments are basically your responses to a post (what you’re reading now). You can express your like or dislike of the post, or give me a tip, or whatever. It’s just you responding to me without talking.

RSS: This is the most confusing part of blogging, but, of course, Technorati explains it well.

“RSS is a file format that allows anyone with a website — from large media companies to individual commentators — to easily “syndicate” their content, similar to how comic strips and popular columns are syndicated by their owners to hundreds of newspapers. Except that on the Web, the RSS syndication is usually free, and the content that is syndicated is often not the full entry, but excerpts and links back to the originating website. Technorati uses RSS to track updates to millions of blogs.”

If you didn’t get any of that, don’t worry too much, I’ll try to explain it later on when we get close to completing the reformation of Wake Up the NEA.

Permalinks: They are simply links that are permanent. If you wanted to link to this specific post, you’d click on it’s permalink at the bottom of the post.

Technorati: I consider this one of the best tools of blogging, and they deserve to have their defintion of themeselves included in this list.

“Technorati is the leading monitor of the world of weblogs. Technorati is a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web. Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time.”

So, we’re finally past the basics, now it’s time to get our hands dirty and start planning and finally–writing.

Your Daily Blog Tip: When writing for your blog, the best thing to do is to write your posts before you sit down at the computer to ensure that you don’t post material that you’d probably regret, or wish you could fix. Read through the post you’ve written to make sure it flows smoothly. Basically, I personally write my posts on paper before I write them on the screen.

Sometimes you may need to sit down at the computer and just start writing, but work to read through the post before it goes on the site.

Coming Tomorrow: Agent Tim goes in and does some dirty work as he lays out the plan for the blog, and how he’s going to work to bring it back to life.

Credits: Thanks to Alex King for the amazing button you see at the beginning of the post. Give him a visit!

*Notice* As of right now, you cannot comment, but you should be able to comment soon.