How To Make Sure Your Blog Isn't Completely Rubbish

Step 1: No one cares about your cats

Seriously. No cats. Get it through your thick skull that not one person among the general populace cares one whit that wikkle Tiddles did the most adorable little yawn earlier today.

Feel free to apply this ‘cat rule' to any other facet of your otherwise-dull life: we also don't care what sort of sandwich you had for lunch, or if it was raining a bit, earlier.

Think about what your blog's for. If it's to “you know, sort of let people know what's going on in your life”, then seriously no one cares and delete it all and scrub clean all the bits of The Internet you wasted with a big scouring pad immediately.

Step 2: Quell your inner Tolstoy

Your thirteen page diatribe on existential symbolism in Tekken 2 may well make your knackers tremble uncontrollably, but the rest of us are part of a fast-paced MTV and Web 2.0 generation and, quite frankly, we no longer have the necessary attention span to slog all the way through your dreary, meandering, plodding prose.

Our time is outrageously precious, so make your blog posts short, light, entertaining and presented in easily digestible little chunks.

Step 3: Learn to Write Properly

Even if you're fourteen years old all this “ur teh leet lol ROFLCOPTER” kiddy txt-speak nonsense looks horrible and curries you absolutely no favours whatsoever. Learn to write properly, with proper grown-up words and full proper sentences. What's more: the occasional simple smiley is just about acceptable, strings of extravagantly animated gifs everywhere acting out something obscure will make your readers want to rip cables directly out of their PCs with their own bare hands in order stop the blight of your God-awful website on their eyes.

Work on your words. Bland, lifeless text is a chore to read, so pepper your post with adjectives and make it sing.

Step 4: You're not Donald Trump

Be honest: no matter how many Google Ads you cram into your blog, unless you're drawing in at least tens of thousands of hits a day, you're not going to be bringing in anything other than pennies. They clutter up your site to a preposterous degree, so leave them off. At least until you've got enough of a reputation to make them worth everyone's while.

Step 5: Make it Prettier

Spend a little bit of time looking into how to make your blog look pretty. You don't need much – there are plenty of templates out there where nerds who know how to program have done all the tech stuff for you, or even tutorials on how to do it yourself. It's genuinely not that hard to learn a little code.

In this day and age, people like to look at happy, pretty websites. A crisp, clean design is best. Don't start throwing in unnecessary and ill-fitting clipart into your sidebar just for the sake of it, it'll look tacky.

Step 6: And another thing...

Don't just Digg everything you write in a desperate and pathetic attempt to garner more traffic, it's needy. This goes double for compiling some arbitrary and meaningless “Top Ten!” list for the same purpose.

Respect your commenters but bear in mind at all times that they're most likely just complete morons mindlessly posting offensive drivel into The Internet by bashing their faces against their keyboards.

Don't just steal other peoples' work and pass it off as your own with a thin introductory line.

Don't make every other word a link to something, no one's ever going to have time to click each and every one of your oh-so-clever references.

Wikipedia is not a hard-and-fast source of every fact ever. It's editable by teenagers, for crying out loud: that's how reliable it is.

Don't forget, having your own little corner of The Internet is a privilege, not a right. So use it responsibly and don't make everyone else look bad just because you can't string two damned sentences together.