10 Blog Tips

Presentation is the key to tip #7. This applies to both the appearance of your blog site as well as the standard of your writing.

Picking up the latter point first, I think a good standard of writing is vital. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, just competent. I’m basically talking spelling and grammar here. There is nothing worse than reading blogs full of weird spellings, txt spk, un-punctuated sentences and, my personal number one bugbear, errant apostrophe’s. So check your words before you write them. It makes you look more professional, and like you care more, as much as anything else.

See if you can include some graphics or images to accompany your text to enliven the appearance of your posts. I’m pretty useless at this, as you can probably tell by the text based nature of this blog so far. The one thing I do do, though, is try and grab logos and things from other sites to use to brighten things up.

Templates and themes

How your blog looks is important. Don’t believe people when they claim otherwise. Often the argument goes that as people are going to be reading you through your feed anyway, what does it matter? The answer to this, of course, is that people have to visit your site before they can subscribe, and if it is some multi-coloured nightmare with scrolling text and other horrible c1997 type stuff, they aren’t going to be subscribing to anything. Here’s a quick list of stuff you might want to bear in mind:

• Make sure your site is reasonably standards-compliant so that as many people as possible can read it. Check it with the w3.org validator
• Ensure that the site won’t take too long to load – so not too many fancy graphics!
• Try to keep things clean and simple – ensuring that your navigation is obviously separate from content, otherwise people will be confused
• Let us know who you are: let’s have a photo and some contact details on the blog home page
• Don’t have a gigantic blogroll on your index, which makes the page go on and on and on. Have a separate page for links if you are desperate to show them off
• Make it clear where people can subscribe to your blog – a little orange RSS icon never goes amiss!

The other issue is what your blog system allows you to do to tart up your blog to add a little extra content which might well enrich your readers’ experience. Why not consider:

• A list of recent posts towards the top of the page
• A recent comments list
• A Flickr badge showing the latest photos you have uploaded
• An update from del.icio.us on the latest sites you have bookmarked
• Clickable icons for readers to subscribe with their aggregator of choice

There really are tonnes of options to have a look at – check out what your blog engine will let you do!

Number 6 out of the 10 tips on blogging is on keeping notes. Writing blog posts that are interesting and well-informed isn’t easy. Sitting down in front of your blog editor waiting for an idea to come is pretty hard. Ideas for posts, though, can hit you at any time. So you need to be ready, with a system for taking notes that you’re comfortable with.

While you are browsing the web, or reading through your RSS subscriptions, you’ll often come across posts you like and want to have another look at later, or maybe just save a quote from it and the link back to the post. I used to keep a copy of a text editor (like Notepad on Windows) open all the time to copy snippets into. This is still a pretty good system, but there are far easier ways of doing it.

Google Notebook is great for storing post ideas. You can select text on a web page and then insert it automatically into a notebook entry – no need for copying and pasting. You can have several notebooks (I have one specifically for this blog, for example, as well as my personal blog) and divide them up with headings. It’s possible to turn them into pseudo-wikis too, by inviting friends to edit them and making them public as web pages.

Similar ways of storing notes like Notebook are the other free wikis that are available, like WikiSpaces, BackPack, PBwiki or Stikipad. I use WikiSpaces myself and it’s a great, simple solution for those that are new to the world of wikis.

Your reader will probably provide a clipping, sharing or news bin type feature, where you can store or mark posts for future reference. You could also post interesting tidbits to your del.icio.us account.

The advantage of these solutions, being web based, is that they are accessible from anywhere. But if you would prefer a system saved on your own computer, or a USB key, say, then you don’t have to stick with the text file option. TiddlyWiki provides a full wiki experience inside a singe HTML file you can run on your PC without being connected to the web. It’s worth mentioning here, though wildly off topic, the GTDTiddlyWiki for fans of Getting Things Done, which is great.

Of course, you can always just write things down. Get a nice notebook, like a Moleskeine maybe. Or just fold a sheet of A4 into quarters and use the different sections for organising your notes.

So it’s really important to have a system you like for holding onto posts and information you’d like to use later. Part of the joy of RSS is the fact that you can access so much more information than before – but keeping a handle on it becomes harder. Fortunately the tools are out there to help you. So try them out and stic with the one that works for you. Your blogging will become much easier, and the ideas will flow!

Linking makes your blog grow in popularity. There are three reasons for this. One, it makes your blog posts more useful if they provide links to what you are talking about, rather than making people hunt stuff out themselves. Second, the people you are linking to will realise you are talking about them and come and check you out. Thirdly, doing plenty of linking will do your search engine profile no harm at all.

Links really are what drives the blogosphere. If you get linked to by one of the big boys, like a Scoble, or a Rubel, or even a Dale, then you’ll find your traffic goes through the roof. It will also give you a boost in the search engines. So if you are generous with your links, giving people credit where it’s due, providing readers with plenty of extra reading material, it’s got to be a good thing.

Sometimes, links to your blog can mean disaster. I’m talking about a link from a site like Digg, or Slashdot. Both these sites have an eponymous ‘effect’ that can spank your site’s bandwidth and possibly bring your blog down. This might not be a problem if you have a hosted blog, but if you pay for your hosting like I do, you could end up with a big bill! That this has never happened to me is testament to my policy of writing deliberately uninteresting and non-linkworthy posts. Honest.

What if you have seen an interesting story but don’t have much to add? There are two ways of dealing with these. One is to set up an account at del.icio.us – where you can bookmark pages for further reading. You can then set up a daily posting, so that your links appear in a bulleted list in a single post every day, thus making the stuff you are reading available to your readers too. The other method would be to create a link blog, a separate blog where you dump either full text or stripped down versions of the posts you read.

I prefer the del.icio.us method.

Playing tag

Another way of providing links is through tagging. You’ll notice that a lot of posts on this blog have tags, links at the bottom of each post that send you back to Technorati, a blog search engine, to look up a certain key word. These are a great way to get traffic as anyone who searches Techorati for those keywords will come across a link to your blog. It’s already the biggest source of traffic for this blog.

Comments

Comments are important. You must allow them on your blog, let people give you feedback or start a conversation. Receiving comments on your blog are a great sign that people are taking notice of what you are writing. Treasure the comments people leave – and always do the courtesy of responding, even if it is just with a ‘thanks!’.

When you link to someone else’s post, why not leave a comment there while you are at it, linking to your blog or even the specific post where you mention it? It’s a good way to get some more traffic. But only do it when you actually have something to say, otherwise you are effectively spamming people’s comments. That’s bad.

You can subscribe to comment feeds with most good blog engines (well, I know WordPress allows it). This can be a great way of tracking conversations you are interested in. You can use services like CoComment as well. Some blogs offer the ability to have email alerts when people respond to a comment you’ve made – why not see if such a thing is available for your blog?

Links and comments make the blogosphere go round. Make sure you’re fully engaged with them.

Two quite quick items here, so I will cover them together.

Feeding frenzy

I discussed earlier the importance of the feeds which other blogs produce – so you must make one available for your blog. If you want to be read, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to do so. That means making your content available in as many forms as possible. RSS feeds have become the standard way for most people to read blogs, as it is just so much more convenient. So, make it clear you have one. Have a nice large orange badge on your site somewhere. Advertise your feed in your site wherever you can – put it near the top so people can subscribe quickly and easily without having to hunt for a link.

If you host your own blog, you can pipe the feed through a service like Feedburner, which allows you to much better monitor the levels of subscriptions and readers you have. it also lets you add little features to your feed, like links to add the post to del.icio.us and how many people have commented on it. I use this service on this blog, and it works like a dream. Feedburner also provides you with loads of little ‘subscribe’ buttons for specific aggregators to make it even easier for people to subscribe.

One feature that Feedburner also provides is the ability to distribute your feed via email. Some people like getting their information this way, and given that the service is free, there is no reason why you shouldn’t implement it. Even better, this is a service that will work with hosted blogs, like those at WordPress.com.

The importance of RSS can be seen in the way that the latest generation of browsers, such as FireFox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, have RSS heavily integrated into them. For example, in FireFox, I just have to click a link to an RSS feed, and it immediately brings up FeedDemon so I can subscribe to it. Great stuff.

One last point on providing your feed. Some systems allow you to issue either a full feed, partial feed or even just a short summary. The aim is that people see the shortened version of your article, are interested and so click through to your site, increasing your hit rate and maybe visiting your advertising, if you have some. I think this is lame. I want to read a whole feed in my aggregator, not mess about clicking links and whatnot.

Nichely done

If you want lots of people to read your blog, it’s best to find a subject to write about. Something pretty specific that marks you out a bit from the crowd. Personal, journal-type blogs are nice, and can be interesting, but unless people know you, why are they going to read it?

Pick a topic you’re interested in, whether technology, or Web2.0 or something to do with your line of work. For example, my day job is working as the risk manager for a local council in the UK. Now, I’ve googled on the topic and I can’t find any risk management blogs out there, so that might be an interesting niche to blog about. Maybe some day I’ll get round to it.

It doesn’t even have to be a topic you know a lot about – blogs where the blogger learns about stuff as they go long can be cool too.

But when you start out, why not try out a few different topics. Widen your scope to start with, to find out which you like writing about the most. That way, you won’t annoy the people who subscribed to a blog about web based office applications only for it to change to being about toilet paper manufacturing after a month.

Second on my list of tips was to make sure you are using the systems that suit how you work. What sort of things am I talking about?

How do you blog?

A blog is of course just a website, and you could write your blog by updating some HTML pages by hand. Some people probably do. But there are a wealth of systems out there that will help make your blogging experience easier, as well as making things more fun for your readers. There are some decisions to be made, though. Do you want to have your blog at a hosted service (like this one is) or have your own webspace, and domain name and install a system there? Do you want to pay for anything? Do you like editing your posts through a web page or would you like to have the peace of mind of an offline editor? I’ll go through these questions in more detail.

Systems, systems, systems

There are many blog engines out there, online services which act as content management systems, theoretically allowing you to concentrate on the content while the engine does all the hard work for you. Some of the more famous and popular ones are Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Drupal, TextPattern and many more. I use WordPress, both at this site and on my personal blog. I genuinely think it is the best platform there is, in terms of features and ease of use. Most services offer a free version, whether only as a trial or forever so it’s worth playing around with them. Many also offer the ability to import the posts you have made in one system into another, so you can carry your experiments around with you.

For a beginner though, it is probably best recommending starting a blog at either Blogger, WordPress.com or Typepad to start with.

To host or not to host?

Well, it’s certainly a question. The difference is basically one of time and effort. For example, if you go down the hosted route, there is no installing of possibly complicated software, no web hosting costs, no domain name renewals and so on. But if you did host your own blog, you would get the chance to customise your blog engine’s installation, using plug-ins and other third party extensions, you could completely redesign your site’s look or use one of thousands of available templates. You could also implement an advertising programme to try and earn some money back on your investment. Using a hosted service also often means you can’t have your own snappy URL, and it might be the case that your chosen address for your blog is no longer available, which can be very annoying!

It is probably fair to say that the best option for the beginner is to try out a hosted service, as mentioned above, like Blogger, WordPress.com or TypePad. Then, when your blogging really takes off you can consider having a domain of your own and can start to experiment with your chosen blog engine.

On or offline?

All the main blog engines come with an editor built in. These are webpages you visit to either enter new posts or to edit existing ones. It means that you can do it wherever you are and you don’t have to bother installing new software.

But sometime that just isn’t enough. There are a whole heap of blog editors out there – effectively stripped-down, blog-enabled word processors, which sit on your machine like any other application and which allow you to type at your leisure – maybe at a laptop without an always-on internet connection. It means you can save posts and mull over them before you send them to your blog. And you can generally do that by just hitting a button. No copying-and-pasting required. They can also do other cool stuff, like uploading images for you, or adding tags to your posts, or presenting you with a preview of what your post will look like online.

I use offline editors for almost all my blogging – the almost being when I am away from my desktop PC at home. To be perfectly honest, I do not know why I prefer doing it this way, I just feel more comfortable with it and I believe that others do too. Maybe it’s the case that, despite flat rate always-on broadband connections, typing into a browser still makes me feel rushed.

The editors I have come across so far are as follows: BlogJet, Qumana, Zoundry, Live Writer and w.Bloggar. All bar BlogJet are currently free. There are others: RocketPost sounds great but doesn’t work; and Ecto has been buggy recently.

Summing up

Don’t rush into a choice of blog engines. Try out a hosted service first before splashing any cash. Do try using an offline blog editor if you find it helps you post more coherently!

Tags: blogger, wordpress, typepad, blogjet, qumana, w.bloggar, live writer, zoundry