Tips to Help Reduce the Noise on Your Blog

What is Blog Noise
These tips are useful for personal blogs, it can also be applied to other types of blog covering more than one niche focus or when you intend to include another niche to support the main focus, but mostly on personal blogs. It can also be considered as a complement for “Creating a user friendly website” but it focusing more on the content structure rather than on the design aspect.

I don’t have any solid written definition yet on what exactly “Blog Noise” is but I hope you will get the point after reading this post.
I like to do blog walking, spend a regular time passing by on another blog especially on personal blogs while at the same time working on my social campaign by writing a comment on blogs with the same niche as mine or when it covers an interesting topic which is good enough to be ignored.

One thing I noticed when visiting other’s blogs is, most of them are noisy, not because they cover more than one topic but it’s more on the presentation. I still can see it covers 1 niche focus with lets say 3 related areas but it scattered all over the place. Just like when you have 30 cards with 3 different colors and then you throw those cards on the floor at the same time. You still can see there are 3 colors but it’s hard to locate and remember the position of each color group right?

Take this blog as an example, please assume as it yours. It covers more than one topic: Blogging Related Stuff, Programming Tips and Software Collections. Sometimes it’s very technical, other times it’s more a collection of essays on any subject that happens to interest the authors. You might have noticed it’s moving direction into more security and privacy related stuff – yes that’s all the articles on VPNs for example.

Then consider the following case:

“What if a single beautiful teenage girl named Sophia read your blog and she only interested in Blogging Related Stuff and she eager to subscribes to your RSS Feed but there is only one RSS Feed directly available to her and the feed contains all of your posts? (your full feed)”

OK, lets assume she subscribes to your full feed. Every morning, she checks his RSS Reader and spotted a new post from your blog, she opens the feed hoping that it will be a new post from your

Blogging Related Stuff category but it’s not, it’s a new post from your Programming Tips and the worst thing is, she has no idea at all about programming 😀 Disappointing right? She still likes your blog because on some occasions she have what she wants to get but she will say that your blog is noisy.
I guess at this point you understand what Blog Noise is.

You can follow these steps to reduce the noise on your blog(s):

Revisit your category listing. It is impossible to highlight each single category so the best practice is to define which one can become your “major categories” from your category list, group the others under those major categories as a child categories then highlight those major categories by – for example – put the latest posts from each of them on your sidebar. Doing so will simplify the content structure without loosing the richness of your blog and it is easier for your visitor to digest your content this way.

Provide several RSS Channels. If you’re branching out to cover a subject and list it under a specific category you’re in charge. Don’t mix up a post on where to get private proxies trial packages with your economic or opinion pieces even in the RSS feeds. Don’t let your readers filter your RSS content themselves by only providing your full RSS feed, don’t expect they willing to do it. Make it easier for them by providing several RSS Feed channels based on your major categories.

I recommend you to use Feedburner free service to deliver your feed because it has statistical capabilities like how many reader subscribe to your RSS Feed and among those subscriber how many of them click back to your blog – useful to help you understanding your audience.
Explain it to your readers. It is a good idea to give your readers an explanation about your content structure, define what each category on your blog is about. Put it on your about page or somewhere they can immediately see it. Make sure they aware and fully understand it.