Making a blog about news is a good way to generate plenty of fresh content daily. So, how do you go about it?

Creating a news blog is not much different really to creating a normal blog when you are setting it up. Buy a domain name, install your software (I recommend WordPress) and choose a theme. But that is when the differences can start.

A different layout to a discussion blog
With a news blog you might not always want to highlight the most recent posts on your home page. Although you will probably want to list them all there, if you are adding a lot of stories then there might be important entries that you want to lead with on your home page. For example, really newsworthy posts might deserve a feature at the top of the page but those ‘dead donkey’ items that you have decided to include might just need a listing further down.

So this gives us a clue as to the layout of the home page – there will be a featured item at the top of the page and then a list of all other recent pieces of news, along with teasers, further down the page.

Side navigation is vital
Also, being a news blog you might not predict which items your readers will find most interesting. Yet it is these that you want to make available to other readers. So in your side navigation add a most popular posts list. It is probably best to use one that calculates popularity based on page hits and looks back over the last day or so to work this out.

Now you have the look of your website sorted, you need to just add the content. And that can be the hard part. Where are you going to get a reliable source of regular news items from? You could try ‘auto blogging’, in which you basically steal content, but that is not good for your blog.

Sourcing quality news
Instead you need to find sources of news items and add them manually to your blog. Write up the news in your own words and include it in relevant categories to make the blog easy to use. Just taking all of your inspiration from one website and rewriting what you find their is in danger of being accused of plagiarism. To do the job properly you need to use several sources of information and to add your own opinion, statistics and value to each news item that you post.

Creating a news blog if done properly can be an interesting way to blog and also a way of gaining lots of followers. However, making sure that you can create a good stream of quality content that gives more than where you are getting it from is the secret to success,