Blogging, before being a tool of expression and communication is a tool of desire, especially these days when thousands of people start a new blog each day, hoping to become successful.

It doesn’t matter how each and every one of them defines success. It can be a big readership, new relationships, business leads, money making or whatever, in the end, it starts out from the desire of doing better for yourself.

Unfortunately, that’s the point where most bloggers get stuck. Success is a two-way street, a give and receive relationship between the blogger and its community, and a blogger that cannot see his work from the readers’ perspective is bound to fail.

Have a clear and easy to digest message

As bloggers, you are the experts, your ideas make sense to you and probably a lot of your readers too, but don’t expect everyone to be able to understand and follow your thoughts as easy as if they were of your level.

In order to attract and maintain a good readership you need to appeal to the novice and the expert both. You need to be able to explain things in such way that novices could understand, but interesting enough so that you engage the advanced ones too.

A good way to reach that is to avoid a vocabulary consisting mostly in technical or complex words. Rather than using such a vocabulary, add references to each of your articles, encouraging the novice to find out more about the topic. The experts can still be engaged by leaving enough room for conversation or second opinions, but don’t expect them to come by their own. Ask for opinions. Different people handle the same situation in different ways and those people might be willing, if encouraged, to share their experiences and results.
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From where I stand, the greatest advantage of blog writing is, without doubt, the instant feedback. Unlike classic media, like newspapers or magazines, our blogs give us the possibility of getting valuable opinions on every post that we publish. Of course, not all feedback should be considered valid, but this is a matter of personal choice and analytic skills.

Writing reader engaging posts is definitely one of the biggest challenges of every blogger, since these posts are usually excellent ways to create and grow a community around your blog. At a short glance, among the advantages of writing reader engaging posts we find:

• Community growth – Obviously, writing quality posts has the power to turn casual visitors into loyal readers, as long as you maintain a good flow;
• Social media exposure – The more interesting and better written the post, the more people will want to share and recommend it across services like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and so on;
• Conversations – A good post is more likely to entice readers to engage in commenting. This is a great way to further develop the topic or even generate new content ideas;
• Networking - Engaging posts are great ways to network with other bloggers in your niche. Write something appealing and you’ll surely make their link-round-ups;
• Quality traffic – Of course, all of the above are great ways to generate either a great deal of traffic or quality traffic.

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When it comes to speaking, there are three types of people:

• those who speak so that other people can listen;
• those who speak only to hear their own voice;
• those who speak because they just can’t shut up.

If you want to be a better blogger, you’d definitely want to be in the first group.

But what does it take to be a good orator? You’d probably say it takes good communication skills, ability to adapt from audience to audience and a spontaneous character.

Some people have these skills written in their DNA, others train them. If you’re looking to speak or write better you should first consider listening and reading more and better.

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”
Epictetus, Greek philosopher

Advantages of being a good listener

Why and how should listening improve our communication skills? First of all, by paying attention to our audience we can observe and analyze the level of interest, which would make it a lot easier to adapt from a situation to another. Therefore, a better blogger is a blogger who listens to his community is more likely to provide real answers and help to real questions. Solutions make people happy.
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Today I’m starting a little experiment in which I would love to include you, Blogsessive’s readers and subscribers. I’ve always said that experience is the best teacher, so lets share a bit of our experience and try to create useful topics and guides out of our knowledge.

Since this is a community debate, the topic I have in mind is:

Is it the uniqueness of content, the author’s writing style, the design?

I’m looking forward to reading your answers in the comments section, after which, I’ll summarize the whole debate into one post that could make a useful guide for start-up bloggers and why not, even more experience blog owners.

A question that has been haunting many bloggers is whether to publish short or long blog posts, when to go for one or the other, or just simply stick to one. This is one of those questions that cannot be answered by a simple “Go for short” or “Go for long”.

There are multiple factors that will affect the way your posts will be received by your readers in either one of these situations. What can be said right from the start is that your readers’ time is short and precious and this will determine whether they’ll read the post or not.

Common Reader Habits

No matter how long your post is, a reader will most times scan it first, and only after decide if that post is worth reading. This clearly indicates that topic, structure and quality of writing are essential factors that will affect your reader’s choice.

While most readers don’t have a lot of time on their hands and that time is split across many blogs, they’ll most likely prefer a concise post that does not stray from the topic, while still providing good insight and personal opinions.
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