One of the central purposes of this blog and thousands of others on the web is to help others. Blogs that help people solve problems get a lot of return visitors. Apply that concept to your classroom, library, or school blog the next time you craft a blog post for it. If your post helps a student, a parent, or a colleague solve a problem, he or she is more likely to return to the blog in the future. Here are three things that you can do to make your blog more helpful to others.

1. Include a video. 
This could be a screencast video that you create or it could be an informative video that you found on the web. Screencast videos are particularly helpful when you’re trying to show someone the steps to solving a problem.

2. Include hand-outs.
If you find that your blog post is going much past 600 words, consider making it available as a PDF that folks can download to read as a printed copy. Similarly, if you’re including slides in your blog post, consider letting people download them to print and write notes on.

3. Include a chart.
This could be a pro-con chart, a flow chart, or a chart comparing similar iPad apps. Over the years I’ve found that people love having charts, especially ones they can download, to help them make decisions.

More ideas about improving your blog will be shared in my upcoming webinar, Winning Blog Strategies. I hope that you’ll join me for it next Wednesday.