Monday, September 19, 2011

How To Create A News Blog

OK. I'm going to assume that you don't want to become CNN overnight. Just that you want to set up a simple blog that delivers news to your readers about a subject that will interest them.

There are a couple of ways that you can create a news blog:


Search out the news yourself, type it up in your own words and post a blog entry
Find one or more news feeds for your subject and include them in your blog

The second method has the advantage that other people create the content for you, so you don't have to be constantly at your computer, searching out news and commenting on it.

The disadvantage of the second method is that you're at the mercy of other people's news feeds.

If they don't update their news, you don't get any fresh news on your blog.

A third way that you could consider to make a news blog is to subscribe to Google News Alerts.

In a lot of ways, this gives you the best of both worlds. You get notified on a regular basis when something newsworthy happens in your subject area. You can then go off and either write a few paragraphs about that news or just write one or two sentences and then link off to the site with the main news article.

Creating a news blog can be a good way to make sure that you always have lots of fresh ideas coming your way. Sometimes the hardest thing about writing a blog is deciding what to write about next. If you concentrate on news items, other people have done the research for you and you can concentrate on adding your own "slant" to the news.

In the offline world, there are whole magazines that do just that. They provide a summary of the week's news. The Week is an excellent example of this (and highly recommended if you want to keep up with the main news in less than an hour a week). The Economist does the same thing but in a more specialist area.

Which means that if you create a news blog in your subject area, you should have a steady flow of both news and readers.

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