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The blog is now an old entity in the new Internet, the one that is forever evolving and moving forward at breakneck speed. We’re about to see the launch of Wolfram Alpha, the search engine that promises to search the Internet with a brain and offer results that are useful at first glance, unlike the huge lists we have to trawl through to find a semblance of what we’re looking for in the first place. But there’s a reason why the humble blog is still relevant in any setting, be it the present or the future, and that’s because it exists solely for the reader.

A blog is an outpouring of ideas and information that exists to satisfy two needs – the need to express in a blog writer, and the need for information and recreation in a reader. There are various reasons why people read blogs – some of them may search for one blog in particular because they know the author, others may stumble upon one in a random search operation and subscribe to its RSS feed after finding it to their liking, and yet others may be looking for certain information which they find to be factually correct and aesthetically presented in a particular blog. But there are probably just a handful of reasons for people to dislike blogs and shun them – because they are not interesting and because they have been written badly.

While it’s hard to make yourself interesting to a virtually unknown reader or capture the attention of all the people who stop by your blog, you can do something to improve the quality of the content on your blog. Good writing is important to draw repeat visitors because:

- People prefer information that is presented clearly and concisely.

- They are turned off by explicit grammatical and semantic mistakes.

- The quality of the content you provide is diluted if the language you use is not up to scratch.

- Spelling and grammatical mistakes can have disastrous consequences if they are misunderstood.

- If you fill your page with keywords just so you gain a higher ranking on Google and its ilk,
you’re not going to have any repeat visitors.

- Your content must be what the reader is looking for (according to their searches) or they’re likely to feel cheated.

- Your content must be easy to browse through and read at a glance.

If your blog is not doing as well as you expect it to, perhaps it’s time to go back and check the basics. Rather than spend time on the fancy accessories like page design and font selection, rather than obsess over the ads you want to place on your page, it’s best to conduct an analysis of your writing and try to inject the qualities that it lacks. Because, when it boils down to it, a blog is just the power of the written word.

This post was contributed by Kimberly Peterson, who writes about the health care administration. She welcomes your feedback at KimPeterson2006 at gmail.com

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