Blogger Idol Week 13: Blog Tips
Blog Tips in two parts.
I. General Tips
- Content, content, content! No one is going to come to your blog unless you are posting relevant and interesting content. Readers, once they get to know you, will allow you to make some of those content free posts (quizzes, meaningless memes, etc.), but you need to make sure that you have some fresh content posted frequently.
- Establish a schedule. Not with specific times but I would suggest getting in some pattern of blogging. Here at WIT, I generally get one entry a day sometime in the evening hours (CST), other bloggers frequently post throughout the day.
- Comment in other blogs. Frequently make rounds to other blogs and make relevant comments and not just a spam for your blog. Build relationships with other bloggers.
- Make archives easily accessible. Make it easy for new readers to get caught up with your online story. Include different types of archives and an easy way to search your archives.
II. My Personal Tips (Or How to Get Me to Read and Interact on Your Blog)
- Make your blog visually interesting. When I am looking at new blogs, I am more likely to stick around your blog if it looks good. All kinds of factors go into this: color scheme, logo design, browser compatibility, etc. Though this is not a deal breaker, make it look good and interesting.
- Make it interactive. To me, blogs have always been a tool for community and community is built through interactivity, mainly comments. Comments is where a blog where comments take on a life of their own. It is quite exciting for me to watch both here at WIT and other blogs that I frequent.
- Tell readers when you are going to be gone. All of us will be away from the keyboard at points during the year (like this coming June for me), but when you are, make sure you let your readers know so they don’t think you have died somewhere and take you off their blogrolls.
- Please ping Blogrolling. It just makes it easier for me to know when I should check in on your blog.
- Say no to LiveJournal. If you are using LiveJournal as CMS, I will not be reading your blog. Sorry. In fact nothing will make me hit the close button faster than a LiveJournal blog. (Except for maybe midi music.)
- Leave a prompt. This is something that works well in my educentric blog and it is a technique that I use quite frequently, but if you are like me and you like comments, leave your readers a prompt at the end of an entry. It is a nice transition to get readers to become commenters.
So what blogging tips do you have? Leave them in the comments.
Class dismissed!
Go read other blog tips here:
April 14th, 2004 at 12:40 am
great tips - they’ll make a valuable contribution to the larger collection that is assembling itself. Thanks heaps.
April 14th, 2004 at 9:04 am
Right… Right…. Check… Well, sort of… I try…. Oops… I did that, I think… I try to remember… Never heard of that… Ah, so that’s what it’s called…
[taking notes]
April 14th, 2004 at 3:23 pm
Around the Horn I
Here’s the first installment of a well-intentioned project just to shine the light on good blogging: Doug at Coffee Swirls shares a good Twain quote and accompanies it with a short personal disclosure. Tony at I am Always Right knocks…
April 14th, 2004 at 3:24 pm
Around the Horn I
Here’s the first installment of a well-intentioned project just to shine the light on good blogging: Doug at Coffee Swirls shares a good Twain quote and accompanies it with a short personal disclosure. Tony at I am Always Right knocks…
April 14th, 2004 at 3:47 pm
Thanks for the blog tips. I wish I knew more about setting up a response.
April 14th, 2004 at 5:27 pm
what’s the problem with livejournal.com? I ask as a relatively new user.
April 14th, 2004 at 6:04 pm
Definitely have to agree with you on the LiveJournal thing. There’s something about LiveJournal that screams pre-teen trash! But maybe that’s me! I was going to put that in my tips, but I didn’t want to offend anyone. The closest I got was my tagboard comment.
April 14th, 2004 at 6:08 pm
Wonderful tips, Christopher. I will be very interested to read the entire collection of blog tips (once I have time) from bloggers around the world. And I’ll keep your tips in mind for my own blog …
April 15th, 2004 at 6:52 am
quick question
is there an easy way (HTML code) to create archives of your blog posts by an index or content type?
April 15th, 2004 at 8:23 am
gopower: LiveJournal just seems ultra cheap. There are other free CMS out there that you can use. When I visit a LJ, they may have a nice looking index page but you leave that page it has a totally different appearance! Whazzup with that? I HATE LJ’s commenting scheme. I hate it! The Archives are also poor. A personal pet peeve of mine would be those stupid little people icons that put next to the links to other LJ logs. Yuck! Now this is not to say that there are no good blogs run on LJ, it just that I won’t read them because I hate LJ so much.
tim, I’m not sure if you can create conntent catagoriees through Blogger. I’m not all that familiar with it, but if anyone knows, help a fellow blogger out!
April 15th, 2004 at 10:06 am
Blah, I am not a Live Journal fan either. When I click a link I never know if I am on the same blog or if I have suddenly warped into some new dimension. Generally it is so confusing and weird that I simply just leave that site immediately. Life is too short to mess around with that jumbled mess. I would say another *Blogging Tip* would be to keep things simple and easy. If it is too difficult for the reader to get around in your site then they probably won’t be back.
Just my two cents…
April 15th, 2004 at 10:31 pm
Great tips Christopher (including the complaint about LJ). Now if only everyone would listen!
April 15th, 2004 at 11:08 pm
LoL.
Blog beef.
Don’t make me sign in to comment.
I won’t.
Live Journals do that don’t they?
Blog on!
April 16th, 2004 at 7:36 am
nothing to add here…just that these smileys are how I feel this morning.
Glad you found the license photo site useful BTW…kinda scary, no?
April 16th, 2004 at 4:43 pm
Yeah, about that Bryan, I posted my comment under the wrong entry, a rather unfortunate entry for the comment that I left, so I deleted it.
Hope you don’t mind. 
April 27th, 2004 at 9:23 am
Good tips, every one. Especially timely, as I’m on a mission to determine the purpose of my blog. I was thinking I could let Rick Warren know I’m concerned about this. We could soon have a new book, “The Purpose-Driven Blog”.