The Matthias Chronicles

Friday, July 25, 2008, 12:47 AM

The face of a blog

By Mar Matthias Darin

I've covered tags or keywords, keyword research, the pitfalls of social bookmarking, the "get rich quick" crap, getting your blog ranked quickly, and the sheeples crowd. Now its time to cover something that gets overlooked quite often --- the face or look of a blog.

The one most misunderstood elements in any blog, even business one, is that blogs are not impersonal. A blog is a reflection of its author. Blogs are not like static web pages. A blog requires timely updates. At most, a blog should have a new article added at least once a week.

I have gone to hundreds of blogs that haven't been updated in six months or longer. I have to ask why the author even bothers to keep it online. Unlike static web pages that might get a face lift once a year or so, blogs are fluid and as such, they must have fresh content. This is absolutely paramount.

Even EntreCard, the new kid on the block, suffers with outdated blogs. For a lack of any other way of putting it, the outdated blogs simple look abandoned. Abandoned blogs hurt any service that thrives on time based content. Because of these "dead" blogs, EntreCard, Digg, or any other service has become a refuse or graveyard littered by their presence.

And it gets worse... What is this abandoned blog saying about its author? Is the author lazy? Do they care about their work? In the real world where the Internet is a touch away to most employers, that type of message can be devastating in a highly volatile job market. For this reason, its best to donate all the articles in the blog to an article archive and delete the blog rather then leave them to the graveyards of the Internet.

For me, any blog not updated within two weeks is dead and abandoned and one I'm likely not to visit ever again.

As I said in the beginning, every blog has a face. That face is either the personal touch of the author or the generic has-been left-over template of the blog software (You know the ones, once you've seen one, you've seen them all). The generic templates are a death to a good blog. I have visited many blogs where the author is brilliant and talented, but their blog looks like sh!t. This can be a serious problem in the job market as well. A perspective employ might question originality, enthusiasm, work ethic, dedication, performance, and work quality, all of which are critical to any job.

Next, color choices can be a bad situation. Picture a page with pea green text and a bright neon orange background. Responses like gross, oh my GOD, what the f@#$, and many others come to mind. Think of the color choices on the page as the color choices you would wear. Imagine someone going in to a job interview as an accountant or bank teller wearing a pea green tie and a bright neon orange shirt. If you were the one doing the hiring, would this person get the job? In most cases, no...

Take a few minutes and ask yourself what is your blog really saying about you. You might not like the answer...

Comments from Mizi

Hi. I just wanted to let you know that I've been reading your chronicles and I like them very much, except religion, which is not one of my favourite subjects. You write about things that many don't (have the guts), with honesty and humor. A blog face shows the inner side of it's author, I couldn't agree more. If I could, I would get a personalized template for my blogs, time will come, I hope. The keyword tool is very useful, thanks for sharing. Congrats on your PR. Cheers!

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

Thank you for dropping by, and commenting. I have bookmarked this blog as well for reading. Thank you.

I live on the wild side at times. My philosophy is that we need to challenge the aspects of our life. Sometimes it requires the "shock factor" to make people think about the situations they live in.

I visited your page and its quite nice. Blogspot is indeed a real pain to customize. The page does reflect who you are and it shows. You have taken a situation with limits and made a very appealing blog with it and that is something to be proud of.

Religion is one of those topics that people either like or dislike. But that's the beautiful of having different perspective. We we were all the same, our world would be very dull and boring.

As far as my PR, its still at a fat whopping 0, nothing new there. My Alexa rank seems to be doing well, for now. The key point to focus on your blogs and not worry about Google's or Alexa's Page Rank.

Comments from hparis

sometimes I think the comments I leave on other people's blogs say more about me than my blog does. I just left a comment on someone's blog which is longer than my average post! I feel like when I'm being engaged by another blogger, I'm more inspired to write, but when I go to write something on my own blog, it's like, "I live a really boring life and have absolutely nothing useful or interesting to say." Oh well.

Comments from Mar Matthias Darin

I know the feeling. Posting on your own blog can be a real challenge. That's where you need to pick something that engages you or something to stirs a reaction, as if you were reading another blog, the news, or a magazine on your interests.

I can't begin to count the number of times I've sat here feeling like an absolute idiot having no idea what to write on...