Top blogs

Before I take you to the advantages of blogging, may I ask you three questions?  Let me begin by asking: Why do you blog? You purpose or provocation for blogging could by any - informing people, sharing thoughts, keeping in touch with friends, selling products and services, making money, or just keeping an online diary of whatever comes to the mind.  My second question: What do you gain from blogging?  Your answer could be any - getting dollars, supplementing business, helping build brand, informing people about my latest activities, promoting a social cause, or just satisfying my urge to create something.  Lastly, may I ask you: What do you lose in blogging?  With so many free blogging platforms available, I don’t think one will lose in terms of payments for site designing and web hosting charges. If I am a professional blogger, chances are that I spend a lot of time and energy in maintaining the blog - but that gives me handsome returns. So...

...continued from the previous post on the release of the listing of topmost Indian Blogs... [The present post, published in June 2011 relates to examining over 5k Indian English blogs in the last six months, manually, to come out with a distilled list of top Indian blogs.] --------- Well, the task of ranking blogs for quality was enormous. Consider four of us giving marks to each blog on each of the many criteria, mixing marks given by each member, filtering blogs based on these criteria, examining the remaining blogs again and screening them for more stringent criteria... Even after this big exercise, we are sure that many will find fault with our ranking of top Indian blogs into Platinum, Gold and Excellent blog categories.  Content quality: We keep this as the top criterion for selecting a blog in the top blogs list and then ranking it higher within the listing. Content quality is a very subjective concept but we boiled it down to such clear criteria: quality of language, er...

This is one of the two articles published in 2011 with detailed observations on how the Indian blogging was faring. Much has changed since then but it is interesting to know how blogging was ruling the social media at that time and Top Blogs team was working hard to manually select blogs and then rank them in three categories. By the way, this was the first full-fledged compilation of top Indian blogs in English by Indian Top Blogs . The categorization was later discontinued and a single listing of top blogs was produced and called the Directory of Best Indian Blogs. You can visit the latest edition of the directory of top Indian blogs at this link. ------------- We are pleased to announce the results of June Indian Blogosphere Survey, 2011. Out of over 5,000 blogs that we screened, we ended up with 98 outstanding blogs. These have been ranked as platinum (14), gold (18) and excellent (66) blogs.  Congratulations to the bloggers whose blogs have been ranked by us or figure in t...

‘Content is king’ is perhaps the best rule that has ever been told to a writer. It has become a cliché but its value has only increased with the advent of the world wide web . M any bloggers who have made good fortune tell that they concentrate on content as much as on other aspects of blogging. We judge written content on websites and blogs in two ways: subject matter and writing skills . Both need to be of excellent quality so that the blog fulfills its purpose of informing, educating or advising people. Such content attracts attention, is referred to by people again and again, makes visitors come to the blog when they look for more such content. If you are focused on making money from blog, good content is key to that in many unseen ways. Please bear in mind that quality content is not one-off affair, nor will it give quick dividends. You must churn out quality regularly; success will come as a by-product. How to write well, and write beautifully? Here are the 10 simple but ver...

Google's attention map: orange is the highest attention zone, followed by yellow and white. Have you ever thought that visitors to your blog usually do not look at the title area as much as they look at the middle of the page? Or that if a blog's homepage is bigger than the size of the screen, visitors might just not take the trouble to scroll the cursor to the lower part? It is common knowledge that blog surfers do not pay equal attention to all parts of a website. But which region of the screen do they tend to focus on and which region they ignore? Google's research shows that the prime region on a website or blog is below the navigation bar and where the main content of the site lies. The eye seems to give less attention to the right side-bar and the top bar. The worst portions, according to Google, are the footer and the right side-bar. You can make use of the attention map given here for web design of your website/ blog. Keep the important content on the ...

Updated: July 2020 Whether your blog is meant for jotting down your routine incidents or has a bigger canvas, you need to follow a few basic principles. The bits of advice that I give here are the basics of blogging, and yet most bloggers take them for granted. The result: the blog does not get traffic, it decays over time, the blogger himself/ herself loses interest and the blog goes down further. Make these basics your cardinal principles of quality blogging, and see your blog glowing and growing. 1. Content is king. It is a cliché, we know, but also a formula that works hundred percent in the long run. Creating good content needs effort and may not give instant traffic, but in the long term nothing can beat the quality of content . An investment of time and energy in writing a quality post will give you traffic and back links, and also immense satisfaction years later.  [We will come up with a post on what makes great content sometime later.] 2. Be regular even if not ...

Updated in 2021 This post was published in February 2011, a few months after the Top Blogs was created. These quick observations made more than a decade give a glimpse of Indian blogging when blogging in western countries had peaked and then plateaued but blogging was in ascendance in India. These were followed by much detailed observations as can be seen here:  Indian blogging scene: observations while compiling list of best blogs   Blogging in India: a detailed perspective ----- T he ranking of blogs for their inclusion in the list of top blogs in India - which we intend to call The Directory of Best Indian Blogs -  is over. As we said before, we have kept the  quality of blogs much higher than their popularity in ranking the blogs. The first comprehensive list of India's best blogs in English will have top blogs (Platinum rank), followed by excellent blogs that have minor issues of design, regularity, interactivity, etc (Gold blogs) and other good blogs (Silver...