Here's a collection of 25 essential blogging tips I've learned since starting my blog. Follow these tips to make sure you are getting the most out of your blog and the Blogosphere.
1. You should be reading the top blogs in your industry to see what your competitors are doing, stay on top of industry news and track the comments to see what your customers and potential customers are interested in and talking about.
2. Plan your blog in advance and make sure you really understand the purpose of the blog and what you hope to accomplish.
3. Figure out how often you want to post and try to be consistent, so readers can detect a pattern and come to rely on your blog as a consistent source of information.
4. Participate in other blogs by commenting. Your fellow bloggers will get to know you, potential customers will get to know you as they see you participating in other blogs and you often get to link to your own blog with your comment, so you are building links.
5. Be authentic and communicate clearly.
6. Creating an open dialogue is the best way to be sure visitors will respond to your content.
7. Focus on what you know best and don't try to make your blog all things to all people.
8. Don't use your blog as a blatant advertisement. Use your blog to build relationships, establish your credibility, excite prospects about what's going on in your industry and your company and be a source of solid information.
9. Always proofread your posts. Avoid spelling mistakes at all times.
10. Backup your blog (If you use
Blogger, you can do this by clicking on "Settings" on the Dashboard... then on the "Basic" page, click on the "Export Blog" link at the top of the page. Rule of thumb is to backup your blog every time you publish a new post).
11. Put a link in your signature on posts.
12. Use
Technorati and
Feedburner.
13. Write "How to" articles. They are very popular and tend to draw a lot of attention.
14. List your blog on directories (See the
Top Blog and RSS Directories page for a full list of directories to submit your blog to).
15. Put an RSS subscription icon on every page.
16. Break long posts into multiple posts.
17. Have a picture of yourself on the "About" page, or even on your blog header graphic.
18. Make it easy for visitors to contact you.
19. Talk directly to your readers and always answer comments and questions.
20. Add podcasts, video, photos and images.
21. After you've written a post, look at it with different eyes. Ask yourself, if I came across this post on someone else's site would I care about it? Does it have some kind of impact on me?
22. To optimise for search engines and your RSS feed, always use keywords in your title.
23. Always clean up comment spam. No one likes a blog littered with comment spam.
24. Web users tend to get lost in large blocks of text - break it into smaller paragraphs and they'll stick with it for longer.
25. Add a poll to your blog. This is a great way to get your readers involved and it can help you tailor your blog's content, based on the feedback you get from your readers. (
Vizu is a great service that allows you create and add free polls to your blog. You can also use
SurveyMonkey to add surveys to your blog).
Got any blogging tips to share? Feel free to post them in the comments section below.
If you haven't already done so, may I suggest you join the
Bloggers Network. The Bloggers Network is a group for bloggers to network with each other. Advertise your blog, post your latest blog posts, plus discuss anything to do with blogging. You can access the group by visiting:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/BloggersNetworkGroup
As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on
Facebook or subscribe to our feed at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog
You can also follow me on Twitter
@djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog
To your blogging success!
