Your blog is going to be more than a platform where you share ideas and prove your expertise on a topic.
It’s going to be a content hub where people come to look for information about their problems and solutions to their pain points.
So if you’re going to start blogging today, it’s important to know the characteristics and features of a good blog and then create, grow, and scale yours based on these elements or principles.
Having been in the blogging business for well over a decade, these are the characteristics of good blogs.:
1. A Good Blog Demonstrates Industry Knowledge
Understanding the industry from a conceptual stance is key. But if you want every blog post you write to stand out, you need to have real firsthand experience with the topic.
Or at least you should demonstrate, in your writing, how passionate you’re about the topic in question.
Real-life experience allows you to share your experiences, learn from them, form relationships, and discover things that you wouldn't learn from a book.
Personally, I would prefer to read blog posts written by someone who knows and understand what they’re talking about, not a piece written by a general freelancer who has no idea what the topic in question is about in the first place.
2. A Good Blog Demonstrates Your Passion for the Niche
Niche selection is an important part in blogging because it’s the only means to discover what you can truly write with passion for months and years to come.
If anything, your blog will stand out from the thousands of options on the web if you’re enthusiastic about the topics you cover.
I’m of the firm belief that if you create content on a topic you don’t like, it will show up in your writing and your readers will notice.
So if you want to create a blog with the vision of turning it into a go-to guide for online readers, I strongly suggest that you focus on an industry you find interesting to explore. Otherwise, you’ll keep things going for a while, lose motivation, and eventually cause your blog to fail.
3. A Good Blog Addresses Readers’ Problems and Offer Solutions
Good blogging goes beyond demonstrating that you’ve become an expert in a niche.
Serious bloggers know that, to succeed, they have to address readers’ problems and suggest effective solutions to their pain points.
If your blog only promotes products just to get people to buy, you’re going to fall flat fast.
But if you focus on all the three parts of the content funnel, your blog will become the go-to guide for any information in your niche.
4. A Good Blog Has Readable Content
The colors you chose for the background and foreground should have enough contrast to make your text simple to read.
Break down long sentences into short, easy-to-read sentences, and break down blocks of text into small, digestible paragraphs.
Take this even further and use numbers and bullet points throughout your content. Doing so is important because it makes it easy for readers to scan your content.
Make sure your content – especially paragraph components – has a large enough font size, something between 12 and 16px, so readers don’t have to strain to read your work.
5. A Good Blog is Easy to Navigate
If people can’t find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll bounce back to the search engine results and look for alternative blog posts.
We call this pogo sticking in SEO, and it’s bad because it can affect your search engine visibility.
So make your blog easy to navigate, and include a search box to enable your visitors find what they’re looking for.
6. A Good Blog Uses Images
There are concepts that words can’t easily explain, and that’s true especially if you’re working on a technical niche. As such, it’s best to incorporate other media besides text.
You can use charts, graphs, images, infographics, and videos.
These can go a long way to explain concepts, increase dwell time on your blog, and engage readers throughout the post.
7. A Good Blog Has a Memorable Brand Name
I can’t stress enough how important it is to name your blog the right way.
Consider a brand name that people will easily remember, so they can come back to your blog more often to read your content.
A one or two-word brandable domain name will do.
8. A Good Blog Has Solid SEO
Look:
It doesn’t make sense to create content no one will ever read.
And given that blogging relies on SEO, even a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization can go a long way to give you the search engine visibility necessary to grow your blog.
So invest your time in keyword research, create topic clusters, write content optimized for readers and search engines, and promote your blog to attract a larger audience over time.
9. Good Blogs Build Relationships
Your blog's entire purpose should be to establish a relationship with its readers. You should encourage actual human contact and create a person-to-person relationship.
10. A Good Blog Allows Reader to Comment
If you’ve disabled the comment section of your blog, you might want to rethink your option and enable this option.
The comment section of your blog is an important area that allows you to collect helpful feedback from your readers, which you can use to improve the quality of your content and the overall value of your blog.
I understand that the comment section can be a heated section of a blog where people can write anything. But given that you can moderate comments before approval, you have full control over what your readers can see and what you think they shouldn’t.
Conclusion
Now that you understand the characteristics and features of a good blog, I strongly recommend investing your time to create a platform that people will treat as a go-to guide to find the information they need when they need it the most.