Apart from your blog design how else is your blog distinct from the rest of the blogosphere?

Is it your content? Your style of writing? Your resources? Your experience? There are many ways that a blogger can make themselves distinct from their nearest competitor, but it all starts with how your present your content.

Here are a few steps you can take to make your blog distinct.

Featured Posts

Showing a few featured posts on your blogs home page, or in the sidebar, is a great way to highlight content that you want your visitors to read. They’ll usually take your heed and read the entire article, rather than just scan through it, which will probably entice them to leave a comment. A well read blog is a successful blog.

Images

Most everyone knows a picture is worth a thousand words. Can you imagine typing out a thousand word post, let alone trying to find someone to read it on the internet? You have to be very well known to get away with it, till that happens use images alongside your content. It works very well, I’ve tried.

Text / Advertising Presentation

Aligning your text to be “justified” doesn’t work very well, so stick with “left” alignment. If you are inserting advertisements within your blog post the best thing to do is too leave some breathing room on top and show it either in between or right after. It might be enticing to insert it right above, but that will just make your new readers leave without having subscribed or bookmarked your blog.

My personal suggestion: Wait till you have achieved a certain milestone to introduce advertisements in your blog.

Readability

Does your CSS styling have the proper padding, margins, line-height and text color for your paragraphs? If not then you should get your blog designer to make sure you do. Don’t forget styling for heading tags, blockquotes, unordered and ordered lists. These are all very important and add heavily to the readability of your content.

Linkage

Are your links easily identifiable as links? The safest colour to go with is blue with an underline, but don’t let that stop you from using a red background with a black dotted underline. As long as your links are easily identified as links you’ll be fine.

It would be a shame for you to write a review of an affiliate program and no one can figure out the difference between your regular content and the link to sign up.

Also, remember to have proper links for authors, comments and navigation.

Categorize Right

Sometimes you can get carried away by placing your post into 5 different categories, this can lead to confusion for a reader who may decide to jump from one category archive to another category archive and see the same post over and over again.

Try and use one, or two, categories only. This way your content will not repeat itself to those readers who decide to delve further into your blog.

Hope those quick tips help you in making your blog more distinct.