Seven Tips for Effective Blogging
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few years, you've no doubt heard about blogs. Bloggers have become a media force to be reckoned with -- they've been responsible for the destruction of companies, the election of political officials, and even the ousting of the same.
Sure... blogs have power -- but with millions of blogs out there, getting your voice heard can be a challenge. Fortunately, there a few things you can do to help make sure that your blog becomes well-read:
1) Write
Strange as it sounds, the best tip I can give is to write, and write a lot. Write relevant, informative posts. Due to the ease of publishing, bloggers are often tempted to post short, one paragraph posts -- typically just rehashing what someone else has said, sometimes even quoting large chunks. Easy as it is, don't do that. Write long, detailed posts. A five paragraph post is far more interesting to a reader than a two sentence commentary.
2) Be original
As I said, avoid the temptation to simply quote someone else's words in your posts. If you feel you must respond to an article or post elsewhere, write original, detailed commentary. Instead of quoting blocks of text, paraphrase. Try to find a unique angle on an issue, and write from that perspective. One sided debates/discussions are boring -- it's clash that keeps a reader's interest.
3) Make use of multimedia
It's 2007, and the infamous Web 2.0 is upon us. Blogs without multimedia look boring and dry compared to their widget-filled, video-enabled, podcasting peers. Writing an article about a concert? Go on YouTube and find a clip. Blogging about a trip you took? Add some pictures. Consider adding a podcast to your blog. Make use of multimedia, and you'll keep your readers entertained. Be smart about multimedia though: flashy pictures and video aren't a substitute for the written word -- use them to supplement text, not replace it. Don't go overboard on the media -- a blog consisting of 25 YouTube videos is a blog that nobody reads.
4) Link
Links are the business cards of blogging world. Link to blogs that interest you. Ask them to link back to you. Make use of pingbacks -- these automatic links will help boost your blog's visibility, and help "pull in" readers from other blogs.
Quick link-building tip: find what keywords you want your blog to be associated with. Search on Google for these keywords. Ask the webmasters of the top few sites to exchange links with you. Since they're ranked highly for your keywords, a link from them will boost your ranking quite a bit.
5) Syndicate
Most blogging software provides RSS or Atom feeds -- so make use of them! Submit your feed to feed directories and aggregators. Hundreds of thousands of readers use feed directories/aggregators to get their daily blogging fix -- so it's crucial that your blog has a presence in these directories.
To notify various web services that your blog has new content posted, you'll use a process called "pinging". Most popular blog software such as Wordpress has ping functionality built in, so you can have your blog ping any directory/aggregator that supports the "RPC2" standard (most do.) If you don't want to configure your blogging software to ping automatically, or if your software doesn't support automatic pinging, you can use a services such as Pingoat to notify a variety of directories/aggregators. Only ping when you've actually updated your blog, since some services may penalize you for pinging without new content.
6) Promote
You can have all the topical, relevant, and detailed content in the world, but it won't do any good if people don't know about it. In addition to submitting your blog to search engines, directories using automated methods, you should also promote your content manually. Topical posts (such as a post on breaking White House news) should be submitted to "social news" sites such as Digg and Reddit. If you're a member of a forum/discussion board, put a link to your blog in your profile/signature (but first be sure to check your forum's rules to see if this is allowed.) In addition to link building (as in tip #4,) you should also make sure to get your blog's name out there -- mention it by name even if linking isn't allowed. Quote passages from your posts to get (potential) readers interested.
7) Polish
Content may be important, but even the best-written, most relevant content won't grab a reader's attention if it's poorly presented. The look of your blog should match the content -- so if you're writing a lot of posts on business or news items, choose a clean and professional layout. Make sure that it's easy to find the content of your posts. I know it sounds simple, but there are a shocking number of blogs out there that are more or less impossible to navigate -- even the most eagle-eyed reader has trouble finding the text of a post amongst the banners, buttons, sidebars and boxes littered across the site. If a reader can't find your content easily, then they'll give up and go elsewhere.
Post teasers are also a good idea -- the front page of your blog should contain a list of the recent posts, each accompanied by the first hundred or so words of the post. There are plugins available for most major blogging software that will allow you to do this automatically -- each post will be abstracted and presented with a link, the text of which will be something to the effect of "Read more about <post title>". Not only does "teasering" save front page space (allowing you to fit more articles in a list), but it also will help grab a reader's attention. If you do choose to use teasers, make sure that your posts take advantage of this -- the first few sentences of your posts should be engaging and intriguing, perhaps even suspenseful.
A word about hosting
Be sure that your blog has good hosting. If one of your posts suddenly becomes popular (such as making the front page of Digg), your web host might not be able to handle the sudden rush of visitors. Installation of a plugin such as WP-Cache will help relieve the load on your server, as will a variety of other tweaks.
The easiest solution, rather than worrying about squeezing every last ounce of performance out of your blog, is to simply get a high-powered web host. Hosts such as Dreamhost provide great hosting for a low price, but you'll have to upgrade if you start getting to the thousands of visitors per day range. Until it gets time to purchase a dedicated server (for which I'd recommend VolumeDrive for the best value,) a good mid-range host such as NearlyFreeSpeech.net will provide you with the horsepower that you need.
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