Starting a blog is relatively easy: come up with a blog idea, pick a publishing platform, and click a “publish” button. Bingo! You are all set to take on the blogosphere, but here comes the hardest part – earning your spot under the tech Sun. Unfortunately, the web-land is already carved up by a gazillion of writers claiming a piece of cyberspace. So if you have intentions of building significant web presence in this cyber-estate market, be ready to back them up with quality content and functional design.

I think that in many ways, building a blog is almost like designing and building a house: You need a thorough plan, desire to stick with it and skills to execute it. Once you find your own parcel of the web-land, you are ready to settle in your new cyber neighborhood. And the next step is to lay down foundation and pour in solid content.

I cannot stress enough the importance of thoughtful and original content. If you do not have one, or don’t want to spend time creating it, stick with poking or tweeting. Good content is not always synonymous with perfect grammar, maximum number of words, and a thesis statement in the last sentence of the first paragraph. Good content is a product of hard work and thorough research that you put into your topic. Sure, good grammar helps, but professionally proofread space-fillers do not stick around for long – eventually, they get dispersed and lost along vast vistas of the web.

The problem here is that when you have just a few posts, readers will have little troubles finding them. In this case, you simply need a basic Kubrick styled blog template to express yourself. But what happens once you grow your blog? You will need to build internal structures to keep your posts organized in a layout that makes it easy for visitors to find what they want. Unfortunately, not every post will have an overwhelming reaction from readers; not every photo will be memorable; not every video will be popular.

I have been running a couple of blogs, and I am pretty happy if 25%-30% of my posts get statistically significant readership. Most of the time, I don’t even know what post or image will have good pageviews. Sometimes, I spend hours researching and writing a post only to see it at the bottom of my website statistics while a substantially shorter post might generate multiple comments and record pageviews. I think it is impossible to pinpoint one exact reason why certain posts fail to generate positive feedback from readers. And as far as I know, the only solution here is to tweak, replace, resize and re-touch posts.
Lately, I have been experimenting with different site designs trying to find a layout that would push certain pageviews out of the web obscurity. So far, the results have been mixed; but at least I can get a slight sense what categories, posts, and pages have a better shot to be winners. If anything, it is a good start, and I suggest tweaking your own design if you have hundreds of under performing posts. In other words, put the winners on display; leave the losers dwell at the bottom. In this time and age, the internet readers do not have patience to sift through all categories and read every post. You can either catch their attention, or lose them. If you manage to turn unique visitors to returning readers, they will forgive your occasional writing blunders and not-so-good photoshoped images. But if you fail to grab their attention the first time around, chances are they will never come back to appreciate your late masterpieces.

I should note that not every blog needs to have a special design, rollovers, flash and dynamic photo galleries. For example, www.islanderspointblank.com is my daily fix for everything New York Islanders. This site has a very simple a la Kubrick theme design and frankly, it does not need any graphical or functional upgrades because it is the extremely popular on its own. How popular? Well, it had 1.5 million pageviews in January 2010 alone. But this type of a site is totally different because it provides time-sensitive information. In most other cases, good content needs to be filtered, separated, and presented in a clear way.

Let’s sum it up:

• You cannot afford to lose potential visitors just because hundreds of your posts are spread out across a site in a messy manner.
• Of course it does not mean that you need a layout stuffed with flash animation, rolling photo galleries, and glowing headers.
• What you need is a solid structure holding and displaying the top 20%-25%, or whatever your conversion is, posts and enticing readers to further explore your content.
• Those visitors might not only bring back additional traffic, comments and links, but also make that elusive spot under the tech Sun one step closer.