Indian Social Media Landscape

Windchimes blog recently earned official badge of achievement as ‘Successful and Outstanding Blogger’. Liz Strauss describes in detail the idea behind running the successful and outstanding blogger program in detail and how you can earn it too.

She states on her blog that this badge is awarded to bloggers who “take the conversations to their readers, contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger”.

Successful and Outstanding Blogger Badge

You can view the directory of all the blogs that have been awarded the badge. As Liz says, “Good Conversation shared can only improve the blogging community”. We couldn’t agree with you more Liz!!

I love Facebook.

There I said it. The reason I was having dilemma stating it openly was that till all this while I considered it as one more yuppie social networking site that will die a quick natural death. But I was wrong. And that only makes me happy. Having turned an entrepreneur, I have realized the kind of benefits I have reaped from its features.

So this post is to those features that each of you can use to promote your brand. Use them wisely and you will experience success whichever category your brand may be operating in. Here goes:

Most number of mails that we get revolve around content for blog. It appears that most bloggers start off writing about a certain subject and then slowly lose way. That happens because they feel that there aren’t many readers on the subject they are writing!! Well, maybe that could be the case if you are writing about very specialized subjects. For most of the others there could be other problems plaguing us.

We have listed out few of them. Check out for yourself if your blog is not party to this.

·         Blogs are fairly unregulated in content. But be careful and sensitive to what you write. A lot of impressions are formed about you as a person while reading your posts. I have read many blogs that talk about ‘sex’ or ‘race and caste discrimination’ but treat the subject with so much maturity that it generates healthy debates and comments.

This is the second in series of the essentials of a blog. In the first part we spoke about content, layout and subscription features. There are sevral ways to increase visibility for your blog but right now let’s continue with highlighting some of the other features that are a must for your blog before you start promoting it.

1.    Maintain a blog roll

Blog roll is an individual’s favourite list of blog links that you have mentioned in the side bar of your blog. Most of the bloggers exchange links in order to increase their visibility and get more readers. The blogs links could be about subjects related to what you write about or could be on your other interests you pursue.

I hear people saying that blogging has really caught on. I wouldn’t go that far – possibly the term ‘blogging’ surely has caught on!! A lot of people do start their blogs and then get lost somewhere down the lane. A lot of it could possibly because of the low hits their blogs are generating. I think it’s mostly because some of the essential aspects of a blog are missing!!

So, it wouldn’t be bad idea to explore this subject more. What we are going to do here is clean up the dust that has settled on the blog, enhance it with few tools and list out few essentials that are a must for each blog!!

1.    First things first. Your blog is your own identity!!

Blogs are a reflection of you as a person. Feel free to write in your own inimitable style. The same rule applies for corporate blogs too. Each brand enjoys a certain personality and character and blogs have to remain true to that brand value.

Don’t worry about being judged. As long as your blog post uses language that is simple and easily understood, there is no right or wrong here.