How to become a better blogger through conversations

I am still relatively new to blogging, so I am still trying to find my voice on how and what I want to blog about. I have had some troubles trying to decide what and how I want to make posts to my blog. This blog is intended to be for subscribers and myself to have posts that deal with the .NET language and other aspects in technology that interest me. Sometimes this means that I am posting links and overviews of interesting sites and articles that I find in my daily work and searching of the net. These posts serve as good repository for myself and hopefully for others to find these sites that they might not have been aware of or forgotten where the site is located.

I have been reading posts on how to become a better blogger in hopes that more people will find this blog useful and more interesting. I recently read a post by Darren Rowse that discussed this topic. He mentions that your blog posts should try to start conversations with your readers to help drive your community and more readers to your site. Darren gave a list of steps to help bloggers start conversations on their blogs.

I thought that I would share the list with you:

1. what did they say well? - rather than just reporting what someone else has said - pick out something that they said especially well or that is the crux of the news.
2. what did they miss? - conversely, one way to add to a conversation is to find a gap in the conversation or a point that might have been missed. Blog from this angle and you add something of real value to readers.
3. answer questions - this one’s pretty obvious really - but if another blogger asks a question - why not answer it - it’s the perfect lead in to a post of your own that takes some of their ideas and extends them.
4. what are others saying? - who else is talking about this story? What are they saying? One useful type of post is the compilation post that pulls together lots of ideas on the one topic and attempts to make sense of them. Look for the patterns in what people are saying - look for the gaps in the collective arguments.
5. how does it apply to you? - take a news story and tell your readers how it applies to you personally. Hearing news as it impacts people can help others interpret what it might mean for them. Tell your story, share your experiences and bring it home on a personal level.
6. look forward - one interesting exercise to do when a story breaks is to ask yourself ‘where might this end up?’ Intstead of just reporting news - hypothesize and predict which might happen as a result of this news.
7. look backward - the past informs and shapes our present. Look back at similar stories or news and see how they played out. Can we learn something from these stories? How do they intersect with and inform our present?
8. extend ideas - I often get to the end of reading posts that others have written and want to add points. You can do this by leaving a comment - or by continuing the conversation on your own blog (with a link back). So turn the next ‘top 10′ article you read on someone else’s blog into a top 20 article on your own.
9. take the ‘opposite’ tack - I love doing this one with my own posts. For example why should you join a blog network and why shouldn’t you join a blog network. You can do the same sort of things with others posts - not just when you disagree with them, but to expand the topic out.
10. ask what if? - one of the best ways of coming up with creative and useful ideas is to take an existing idea and asking ‘what if…’ about it. Sometimes the what if questions will see out of ‘left field’ - but ‘left field’ is where geniuses often live!
11. play devil’s advocate - you might not disagree with what another blogger has written - but taking the opposing argument to see where it leads can be an illuminating journey. For example - I’ve asked readers a couple of times to answer the question ‘What’s wrong with blogging?‘ - the results were illuminating and I know that a number of new blog tools were written to overcome some of the submitted problems with blogging.