Using Current Events to Attract Readers to Your Blog

There are several ways in which to create interest for your blog. Just look at the world around you. Current events are the pulsing life blood of the media, keeping the world informed of things occurring right now. Whoever has a handle on this has a good grip on media coverage overall. This can mean a lot of things, but more importantly it means that this person can gain a large and dedicated audience as they have become a trusted resource for breaking news.

That is not even the end of the story. After the world receives the breaking news, it immediately wants an analysis of the breaking news. Beyond that, the world wants to share its own thoughts and opinions about the breaking news. This cycle is something you as a blogger can take advantage of, even if you are not the one breaking the news all the time.

Use current events to provide inspiration for your own blog topics, if you come across any that are relevant for your needs. Do they go along with the theme of your blog? Is this current event story well enough aligned with the principles of your blog that it warrants an article written by yourself?

If so, you can use a given current event to further establish yourself as an authority and instill your values and opinions into the articles you write. Current events are topics that people are discussing at work and at home, on social networks and on blogs. Being on top of current events and providing a comprehensive editorial on a given occurrence can extend a great deal of credibility to yourself and your blog. This is because the combination of reading the news and offering up your opinion of that news makes you a useful resource to others.

There are a few ways in which you can stay on top of the news. Set up your blog RSS feed reader, organizing it into categories that suit your needs. The more organized your feed reader, the easier it will be for you to stay on top of the news. Avoid story and topic redundancies by using a robust reader such as Google Reader.
Twitter is also another great way to stay on top of current events. Trending topics on Twitter give you a real time look at what the Twitterverse is discussing. Now that Twitter has become a mainstream social networking tool, these trending topics give an accurate depiction of what the population is discussing.

You can take all of these as cues as to which current events will yield the highest return for your blog article in particular. The more relevant your article, the easier it will be for others to come across your blog. This is because people often do web searches for current events after they hear something on the news or discuss a current event with a friend or coworker. The higher up you can be in these search engine results, the more readers you can obtain. Turning to various search tools such as Twitter means that your content has a fighting chance beyond Google to be accessed by a wide pool of potential readers, so be sure to push your blog out across several sites and services in order to gain visibility.

With this you can also take advantage of people’s desire to discuss current events, as you post your blog link on social networking sites, etc. By playing to people’s piqued interests, you are giving them a point of view on a topic they are already following and also giving them an opportunity to chime in on the topic as well. So even if you are unable to break the news for a particular story, you can still use current events as a way to appeal to an established set of readers, promoting your blog all the while.

Written by Kristen Nicole from Kristen Nicole
Posted on September 28th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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