As I said on “Blogging for money: the good, the bad and the ugly” I have found that the ideas of consistency, discipline, predictability, originality and quality are very helpful to overcome the difficulty to create quality content, get attention from your readers and be remarkable among all the competition.

In the past I have followed those 5 principles in my blogs, but predictability was the last one that I discovered therefore I wasn’t able to follow it as diligently as it deserves.

Predictability is not a union between consistency (write about one well-defined subject) and discipline (write on a consistent basis, daily if possible). Predictability means your readers will always know that when they visit your blog they will find useful material for them. So it seems that just by selecting a well-defined topic all the work is done. But that is not correct.

I can give you an example: Coderbattery.com. Coderbattery is a blog I founded on January 1st 2007, where I planned to write about the subject of software development. The problem is that software development is a very huge subject, that comprises a lot of other sub-topics that you must touch at least one time. Don’t get me wrong, if your blog is dedicated to a huge subject that doesn’t mean you have failed on your topic’s selection. In fact you surely know there are bloggers who work with huge subjects and they do it pretty well (Daniel with blogging and Steve Pavlina with personal development are excelent examples).

But the problem with software development is that their sub-topics are disjoint. I mean, when I write a post about the Perl programming language, Java developers won’t find almost anything useful there because Perl and Java are just so different programming languages. The same if I write a post about web programming, because desktop software developers won’t find much value there. Can you see it? Software development sub-topics are very very disjoint so it’s difficult to create a community around your blog given this situation. The best bloggers in this subject generally write about software development as a discipline, so they don’t put their feet in the earth with real examples of code (at least most of the times).

Does this mean there are topics which you just cannot pick for a blog because they are so huge? Not at all. This means it will cost you a little more to do it.

I’m looking for a good strategy to do better with Coderbattery.com and I think I have found the right formula. The secret is, maybe you just figured it out, predictability. But how? Your blog must be even more predictable than other’s blogs, and in Coderbattery.com’s case, a very good way to do it is to devote each day of the week to some kind of post. This way Perl developers will always know that they will find useful material for them all the Fridays, meanwhile Java developers will visit the blog every Wednesday looking for a smart Java tip to empower their code. TV channels have used this strategy for a long time so you already know it is very useful to let your audience know when to expect something valuable for them.

Other developer’s sites like howtoforge.com or the O’Reilly network, have chosen to make clear distinctions between their topics, by separating them in clearly distinct sections or distinct subdomains. They have also chosen not to follow a blog publishing style but for me and Coderbattery.com I think is better to follow the schedule-based publishing style.

And how is this tip related to the topic of make money online that this blog follows? Simple. If you want to make money with your blog you must start creating a community around that blog. Without readers you won’t be able to monetize your blog, so if you chose a difficult subject like I did with Coderbattery.com, now you know why it’s so hard to get your readers come back to your blog even when some of your posts reach a good number of page views.

This post was written for the “Blog project: Blogging mistakes” by Daniel Scocco, creator of the excellent blog www.dailyblogtips.com. If you are new to blogging and don’t know what you can do with it keep visiting Daniel’s blog in a daily basis and in no time you will see that your blogging skills will be dramatically enhanced.

And of course and as usual, if you found this post useful for you please consider subscribing to RobertoAlamos.com by email or RSS. Your wallet will be thankful

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.