What is great blog content? How do you know your content is good?

Reader Helen Vatter asked an interesting question in a comment to my recent blog post about bloggers needing to more actively promote their blogs.

In the discussion about that post, the big difference between good and bad self-promotion was the quality of the content that you promote. If the content creates value to the reader it is good enough for self-promotion, but if it doesn’t then it is frowned upon and seen as spam.

So Helen asked how do you know if your content is good and if it creates value.

Do you have any suggestions for people that are new to social media and are trying to get a readership for their blog? I don’t think it is expectable that from the start everyone defines their own niche and targets the people in that niche with compelling content, the process is much more complex than that. And maybe people just wanna share some thoughts without having much experience yet.

I am in this situation. I am new to social media, and I know that readership will follow great content, but what is great content and how do you know if your content is good if noone reads it or comments on it?

Therefore my question for really basic start-up tactics to promote a new blog. I also wrote about this issue in my blog post about the entry barriers of social media. http://tinyurl.com/dxnlrm

My answer to the blog content question

Check some of my earlier Twitter articles on information on how you can brand yourself as an expert on Twitter.

Personally I would recommend searching Twitter for your keywords. See what people are talking about, what questions they have. Then respond to that, write a blog article about it, provide some useful tips and ideas. And then tell them about it.

Write what you feel is useful and valuable, write about your experience, what worked good for you, and spread it out there and then see the feedback. Learn, improve, and do it all over again.

Opinions from other bloggers

How to measure the value your content create

I personally feel my content is good when I see people commenting on it and when I can see a lot of buzz being created about it with retweets on Twitter and submissions to StumbleUpon.

When your reader takes the time to write a comment or to submit your article to StumbleUpon or tweet your article to their Twitter followers it is a good sign that your article has created value and that it was appreciated by the reader.

How do you know if your blog content is good?

What do you think? How do you know if your content is good and if it provides value to your readers? How do you measure the value of your content?

Image by Helmet13