One of the best things a blog can offer to its reader is fresh, relevant content. ExtremeLee talked about Blogger’s Block and how to work on it in order to come up with more content for your site. One thing you can do to increase content on your site, and user participation at the same time, is to allow guest blogging.

Guest blogging basically does what it says; allowing guests to write main entries on your site. These guests can be readers to your site, or you can invite other bloggers who have something to contribute to the topic your blog focuses on. A new blogger on your site can provide new content for your site, and also freshen up things for your readers. These bloggers can also provide you, the site owner, information as to how to improve your site through their writing. This can also help you come up with new ideas for your own future topics.

You have to setup at least 2 rules for allowing guest bloggers.

1. You shouldn’t allow anyone to become a guest blogger. You should find someone whose writing can cater to the needs of your readers, even if the writing is different than what you yourself are used to.
2. If you ask someone to write on your site, make sure that if that writer offers one version of a topic [for example, abortion, definition of marriage, Microsoft being a monopoly or not, etc], you should try to offer the opposite version of the story also, either by writing about it yourself or through another guest blogger, so that it’s clear you’re not inviting guest bloggers who’re offering one side of the story.

The exception to such a rule can be when you’re catering to a specific theme. For example, if your site is an anti-abortion site and you don’t want to offer posts supporting abortion, you could allow guest bloggers who support you on the issue, if that’s what your site is about.

Guest bloggers can be invited for a certain topic, to cover up for a time you may not be available to write on your site [such as being on a vacation], to offer more opinions and perspectives for your readers, or simply to help you get over your writer’s block. The guest bloggers can be invited regularly also, if you wish, like on certain days of the week or every xx number of days. The users on your site will feel appreciated at the same time, as they would see that you’re allowing someone, just like the user, to write on your site. That would make them more interested to see that you’re actively looking forward to the interests of your user, and may also make them interested in offering content to be published on your blog.

Good luck finding a guest blogger.

One important aspect of running a site is to know your visitors. If you know your users, you can find out what they’re looking for, and how they came to your site. You should check your logs regularly to track any changes in the behavior of the people who visit your site, and also to see which areas of the world they’re from. This can help in many ways.

For example, if you write about hockey and focus on Canadian hockey, you may find that most of the people come to your site by typing the word “hockey” in search engines, and that they’re from France. You can then start writing about hockey in France also, to cater to those people too if you wish and thus convert them into loyal readers.

One such tool for mapping out your users visually through their geographic location is gVisit. Gvisit [not owned by Google, by the way] uses Google Maps to plot a diagram of the last 10 people who visited your site, and which part of the world they probably came from. You can then zoom down to their probable exact location, down to their street map and name. The general information of their geographic location [such as their continent] will help you a lot in knowing what types of users your site is attracting.

Ping is the method to let some well-known sites know that you have recently updated your blog. This is a little bit different in concept than the traditional ping, which you use to ping a computer on a network to see if it responds or not. When you ping your blog, it sends a note to the site you pinged letting that site know that your site has fresh content. People visit these big web-sites, often, to find out a list of recently updated sites. The whole wide web is so big, that it is almost impossible to see another site being updated without having a reference to it. You can bring that reference to the attention of the people through the pings. One of the most famous site that falls into that category, and has been around for a while, is Weblogs.com .

There is one basic rule we should follow when using this technique; if we update our blog every 5 minutes during any time period, we should not send a ping every 5 minutes. While it may bring in more visitors, sending a ping repeatedly within very short time spans may actually get a site banned from the site that is receiving the ping, as such a technique is also used by those who simply wish to have their site noticed more often, whether or not they have updated content on their sites.

Many blog publishing tools offer you the option of pinging Weblogs.com or some other popular sites. There are several places you can send a ping to, which is a problem today as webmasters and writers have to ping numerous sites repeatedly to let them know that the site has been updated. One of the online tools that allow you to ping numerous sites at the same time within one interface is Ping-O-Matic.

Did you know that if you have a Yahoo account, you also have a free blogging account with Yahoo called Yahoo! 360°? Similarly, did you know that if you had a Microsoft Hotmail account, you also already had a free blogging account with Microsoft called MSN Spaces?

Both sites allow you to post with editors that help you post pictures and change fonts for your posts. With Yahoo 360°, you get a domain name like http://360.yahoo.com/username , where “username” is your Yahoo user id. With MSN Spaces, you get a domain name like http://spaces.msn.com/members/yourname, where “yourname” can be anything that is available and that you wish, even if it is different than your MSN username. MSN Spaces is also integrated into MSN Messenger. MSN allows you to update your blog through the online interface or through your mobile phone. Yahoo allows you to post your entries through the online interface, mobile phone, and also through the Yahoo Messenger.

To see an example of what can be achieved with Yahoo 360°, you can visit the Yahoo 360° blog page. You can do the same, to see some examples of a MSN Spaces blog, at the MSN Spaces directory.

If you write content regularly for any site, you may already be aware of how important a writing tool is for you. Whether you use Notepad to write your articles or something else, you know that revising your content and analyzing it a few times before publishing it is better than writing it directly into a page and then publishing it without any revisions. If have a blog, sometimes you may need something more advanced than simply typing your content. Sometimes you may need an editor designed specifically for blogging. One of the most popular blog post editors out there is wBloggar, available in many different languages.

wBloggar comes with many useful features, such as font changing capabilities, preview option to preview your final content before publishing it, a spell checker, and more. It is compatible with dozens of CMS [Content Management Systems] systems out there, including WordPress. You can post new articles, save drafts, or edit already existing articles on your site. The tool offers the options to upload your post along with images, so that you don’t have to upload the images related to your articles separately.

The tool is also a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] editor, so working with or without the knowledge of html is almost the same, and you can achieve the same results in both cases for your articles. On top of that, the program allows you to ping weblogs.com anytime you post or update an article. The program is free to download and use, and currently runs on all Windows platforms.

The purpose of majority of the web sites is to keep the visitor happy. Once online, your visitors cannot see you face to face immediately, nor can they talk to you. The only way they can interact with you at the moment is to browse your site, and read what you have to say. Imagine being at a local store, where you see no workers, but machines everywhere. You scan your items, you pay, and you leave. No one offers you any discount, no one offers you any smile, and no one greets you or says goodbye to you. That would feel weird, wouldn’t it?

In the same way, the days are gone when internet users came to a site that offered no way to contact the author, and even more strange, no way to let the user offer any suggestion or advice related to the content posted on the site. Today, a successful site should work just like a retail store, or even a local coffee shop. You should do the following three things to make sure your visitor has a good experience at your site:

1. Enable your visitors to interact with you via email
2. Allow them to leave comments
3. Let them interact with other visitors and users on the site.

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