The “hot news” on the Blogosphere this morning is the interview between Alan Meckler and Jason Calacanis in the Wall Street Journal.  The discussion is geared more towards the individual blogger with the experience Jason has as the CEO of a major blog network.

The discussion (according to tech.memeorandum) is pretty diverse.  A lot of people are focusing in on the “if you hit this traffic level you make good money …” aspect of the article, however I think this is only part of the story.  Jason touches on it with this short comment:

The fact is that the “long tail” of sites is largely unmonetized. Over the next five to 10 years, Google AdSense, Weblogs Inc., Yahoo Publisher Network, AOL’s white-labeled version of AdSense, and Microsoft’s “AdSense killer” will enable the monetization of a lot of those smaller sites.

For businesses blogging, there might not be much, if any, interest in putting ads on their blogs.  However, if you are a small business or a solo pro … earning a little extra cash is a nice bonus.

Looking at the larger picture, though, most of the major ad networks recognize that there are a lot of untapped (un-added?) blogs out there.  Leveraging that potential real estate is going to be the challenge of 2006.

Tags: blog advertising, long tail

 

Sadly, Google has no sense of humor. Thus, some advise in search engine optimization from an unlikely source: the NY Times. Of course, for the best advice on optimizing your blog for Google, check out the posts of our own Stephan Spencer.

So Andy whimped out and asked me to post for him about the official release of his book “BlogWild!“. Geez Andy, it’s a great book! Why wouldn’t you want to write about it? Now I’ve already done a review of both Andy’s and Des’ books, but this is Andy’s day. The book is real, it’s done, it’s even hard cover!

And I really did enjoy it (I still have to try the recipes). Here’s my thing about business books. First they need to be readable. Good prose is key. Humour is important. Next, they need to cut to the chase. Brevity scores major points in my book. Took me less than an hour to go cover to cover (yeah, okay I skimmed the Typepad sections … but I know when I’m fixing Toby’s site I’ll be referring to it). So if you car pool to work or take transit, you might be able to be done and have action steps before you even get to work!

That brings me to my next (and next to last) point … action items. End the chapters with nice easy action items. Something short and tangible that could even be done while you’re on hold or something. Intense action items just don’t work. KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid.

Finally, the anti-hype factor. Yes, blogs are hot. Yes, people are clamoring about them. But there are real business reasons for using the a blog to get your message out. How about saving money! There’s a good one (and it’s in Andy’s book). Andy leverages the hype about blogs to get your attention, but then puts all the advice into anti-hype tone. This is so important. People might get sick of talking about “blogs” per se, but they aren’t going to get sick of being able to write about their business, communicate with customers, and get a good search engine ranking for like $15/mo.

So … Andy’s book is for real. Congrats Andy!. And boy with all the authors on this site I’m getting to feel like the odd man out! Oh well. Who wants to read a book written by a geek anyway.

Tags: BlogWild, Andy Wibbels

Recently I wrote a post on optimizing your TypePad blog titles for the search engines. Today I read a well-documented article called Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Bill Hartzer.

In it he discusses techniques to use if WordPress or Movable Type is your platform of choice. He also has some good information on promoting your blog. (Although, how he forgot Stephan Spencer’s fantastic collection of WordPress plug-ins I’ll never know!)
If you’re using your blog as a lead-generation tool be sure to check this article out.

Click image for free report

Last Friday I spoke at the annual conference for NAPO: The National Association of Professional Organizers, on the topic of “How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog.”Since this is a constantly evolving seminar for me, there were significant changes from what I submitted in January and what I presented in March. I posted the handouts to my Web site for any attendees who wanted to download them.

I then decided to open that up to anyone who wanted to download and review the handouts. The target audience for the seminar is entrepreneurs and small business owners, but there’s a lot of information in there for anyone.

The download is free, but an email registration is required. (1MB, PDF.)

I was asked via email by a reader whether a company’s blog should live at blog.mycompany.com or mycompanyblog.com.

If the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.

For example, if a life insurance company had a blog about health and wellness at www.stayinghealthy.com, I would expect that to garner many more links from the blogosphere than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com.

This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is the key ingredient for long-term success with a corporate blog. Everything else to me is peripheral.

Today, less than 48 hours away from doing a presentation about business blogging at an Australian Marketing Institute seminar in Sydney, I am rather pleased to see that the lead story in the national newspaper The Australian’s IT Business segment, is ‘Blogging the Brand’, by Chris Jenkins. Neat: I can expect that a reasonable number of my marketing industry audience tomorrow night will have read or at least skimmed this piece on corporate blogging and will be ready with some good, challenging questions. It helps too, that the article comes close on the heels of a page 3 story last weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Online buying frenzy as big business swoops on sites’, by highly respected journalist Tom Burton, about people making money from the web: about half of the article focuses on people making money from blogging.

Back to the article in The Australian. I found it quite informative, not so much for me in terms of  theories and broad observations about corporate blogging, but more because of comments from the trenches. I was particularly interested in the comments from Paul Crisp, ‘new media project leader’, responsible for the blogging operation at our major telco, one of Australia’s biggest corporations, Telstra, through its Now We Are Talking site, which has blogs by staff members as a feature.

Crisp acknowledges that Telstra had no Australian corporate blogging models to draw on, so had to adapt what it could learn from studying what US-based corporations were doing, such as Boeing, Microsoft and General Motors. He observes that Telstra does not need blogs to ‘push out’ information’, but sees blogs as giving the corporation a way to plug into public feedback (interesting, given that probably every Australian over the age of 15 has a Telstra story and they are not all positive!). He also sees blogs as allowing Telstra to put a different face to its message.

‘If you want to hear from the rank and file of the company, to try and put a face to the people that make this big company work and get their perspective and the challenges they face and what turns them on, here’s an opportunity to get it directly from the horse’s mouth.’

I took some time out to check out the blogs at Now We Are Talking. I had honestly expected them to be rather bland. They aren’t, and I’m impressed. I’m especially impressed because employees are writing about potentially contentious issues and there are comments on the blogs from the general public (I am so not a conspiracy theorist that I do believe they are from the general public!).  

The article also quotes Aussie Microsoft blogger, Frank Arrigo, author of the excellent Frankarr blog. On the subject of risk, which is invariably given prominence in the occasional Australian media story about corporate blogging, Frank observes succinctly: 

“There is always a risk, but it’s no different to me being at the pub and bitching about my job and there is a journo next to me,’ he says.

And with eminent good sense, it seems to me, Frank goes on to say that if he doesn’t want to see something appear on the front page of one of the national dailies, he doesn’t blog it.

(Note that the link above to the story in The Australian is a weblink but not a permalink and regrettably there is no link available for the Sydney Morning Herald piece.)

Recently I was meeting with a couple of blogging clients and one asked me, “How do I get the most out of Technorati?”

I thought that was a great question, and worthy of a few posts. Although I’m sure there’s more than what I’ve written below, this is a good start for any one who’s interested in driving more traffic to their blog and finding like minded business bloggers. I’ve even included a couple of how-to movies.

• Technorati: Business Blogging Tools for You
• Technorati: How (and Why) to Claim Your Blog
• Create a Watchlist at Technorati (movie)
• Tagging Your Posts in TypePad (movie)

If you have any Technorati specific questions or issues leave a comment below, and I’ll try and add them to this list.

Dave Winer, the founding father of RSS, has a lucid essay on putting valuation on the current state of RSS investment in the world. Given the VC investment, the number of companies doing RSS and podcasting that have invested in RSS, and even the companies like Pheedo and FeedBurner that have hired and entire staff devoted to RSS, there’s a pretty substantial chunk of capital that’s decked against this technology.

I analogize it to CRM (Customer Relationship Management). I’m not sure who is the ‘arguable’ father of CRM – perhaps Tom Siebel plays a role. CRM is essentially the ‘plumbing’ of customer data & customer interactions inside most major companies. As of 2003, the CRM market was around $8.8 billion. It’s only grown from there. But if only 19% of user licenses of software like SAP are deployed, then I guess they’ve got issues greater then market size to contend with.
Back to RSS. The investment, however large, is real, and it’s alive. RSS is not a technology that sits on the shelf. RSS, once implemented, lives, breaths and connects content to customers, just by the nature of its very being.
In some ways, RSS is changing the ‘plumbing’ of the Internet and its effects are profound. The RSS investment trend illustrates just how powerful blogging and social media are in this web 2.0 world. Something CRM didn’t have in it’s favor.

To that end, Dave puts it this way.

Here’s one way to visualize it. Let’s assume the average home price in the U.S. is $400K. So $8.2 billion is about 21,000 houses. Now imagine you wanted to change the way the plumbing worked in all of those homes. You get the idea. There’s no way 4 or 5 random people on a Yahoo mail list, people of ordinary means, can move that much capital without having a pretty compelling argument and making it an incredibly compelling way.

Dave has a great point there. However, his next point is even more important.

Viewed another way, given that Scripting News, for years, was the central if not primary means of distributing information about RSS, it gives you a sense of how powerful blogging is. It can’t move that much capital overnight, but given enough time, and persistence, and a high-quality idea, you can create quite an economic effect.

That’s the mantra on RSS. Focus on the vision, persist in “changing out the plumbing”, and pushing for the constant incremental economic effects for and from RSS advancement.

Shamelessly cross-posted at the Pheedo blog.

A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.

It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.

It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:

• identify a wide variety of trusted sources of novel and important news and commentary
• take in an overwhelming amount of information from these sources
• ruminate on this information, analyzing and making a judgment call on its value and relevance to his/her constituents
• cull, aggregate, categorize, prioritize, and comment on the information collected, in an effort to make it more relevant, timely, useful, and actionable
• republish it in a format that can be easily disseminated and further analyzed / commented on by others of his/her kind in disparate parts of the world

This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!

I was talking with my girlfriend last night about this and Dana’s post about the most influential business bloggers (and a quick IM chat) really drove this point home … a lot of us have started great careers (sometimes even new ones) through blogging.

Think about Steve Rubel … he started a CooperKatz, started blogging and is now one of the most respected PR and business bloggers out there … not to mention now a senior VP at Edelman.

How about Dana … from his blogging and consulting … Pheedo

Rick Bruner … DoubleClick.

Me? From a consultant trying blogging for a kick to CBO at Qumana and partner in One By One Media

The lesson here is that blogging isn’t a magic bullet, but it does let you highlight your skills and talents to the world. Just by writing about what your are passionate about. Not bad. Not easy either, btw. It does take a lot of work, a lot of reading, and dedication. The rewards? Well the rewards are worth it. I enjoy writing but I enjoy even more the feeling that I’ve embarked on a whole new career path, just by doing something I love to do. And a new career that I am excited about and looking forward to for years to come.

So … fellow BBCers … what’s your story?

Tags: business bloggoing, blogging careers

Yes and no. Many blog entries just don’t elicit a response, even if it’s a popular or well-read blog. But sometimes a blog entry hits a nerve and it’s like uncorking a geyser.

That’s what’s happening today over on Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion blog where he’s announced that he’s moving to Edelman as a Senior VP. 42 comments and counting (“hey, congrats!” and “you da man!”) as of 2:48 PM Eastern. Hey, Steve, what’s the most comments you’ve ever gotten on one of your blog posts? We’d love to hear.

Micro Persuasion is #72 on Technorati’s Top 100 blog list.

Many blogs offer email subscriptions to their blog, usually via Feedblitz or Bloglet. As I mentioned in a previous post, now AWeber, more well-known for its autoresponder service, is also offering an email broadcasts of RSS feeds.

What I like about service is how customizable it is; you can create an HTML template that complements your blog design. AWeber also offers a series of predesigned templates for you to choose from. HTML and plain text versions are automatically generated. Confirmed opt-in is required, so you’ll only be sending these emails to people who really want them, keeping you safe from charges of spamming.

There’s no additional fee for this service for people who are already AWeber members, but membership is $20/mo. (AWeber memberships also offer powerful autoresponders and the ability to publish email newsletters.)

I especially like the flexibilty you have with the layout and the ability to add messages to outgoing emails. In the example above, you can see that I created links to articles on my Web site. Through the admin system these messages are easy to change, even if you’re not comfortable with HTML. There is also the ability to track clickthrus and view other reports. You can also choose how many posts will appear in a single email broadcast.
Two things I don’t like about the current AWeber offering, however:

1. You can’t choose between full text and excerpt; the system automatically limits your email with a “Read more…” link.
2. Images and links you may have created in your feed do not carry into the email version.

Tom Kulzer, the CEO and Founder of AWeber says both these features are being considered for a future release.

One other thing that may work against AWeber is the fact that Feedblitz now offers many if not all of these feed related services, plus others, for just $4.95/mo. Although I haven’t yet tested Feedblitz, it appears to offer a compelling alternative.

Although I’m not much of a yachtsman myself, living on the coast of Maine I have a lot of friends who own boats, and I’ve learned a lot through osmosis.

One thing I’ve learned is that they can’t get enough of pictures of boats; they refer to it as “boat porn.” It takes an especially tight hold of them when they’re ready to buy their next boat.

Which is why I think it’s such a great idea that Sabre Yachts, (a client of mine,) is telling the story of the construction of a yacht in the Sabre Yachts Blog.

Bentley Collins, their resident blogger, has been taking photos from the factory floor and telling the story of one Sabreline 34 Hard Top Express. (Unlike humans, boat builders usually know the type of boat beforehand.) It’s only two posts in, but Bentley says he’ll blog this until the boat leaves the factory. (Maybe we can then track the boat to its eventual owner and convince him/her to continue blogging!)
Having taken a factory tour, I have to say it’s quite a cool adventure.

If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.

One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick? 😉

So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:

• Offer a niche-specific blogroll, tool, How-To, or compilation of news stories.
• Post a scoop.
• Expose a story as flawed or a fraud
• Be a contrarian about a story, product, or prominent blogger’s opinion.
• Be humorous. Good topics include a bizzare pic of your subject, “10 things I hate about…”, and “You know you’re a when…”
• Publish or commission some original research
• Creative-Commons-license photos you made of an event you’re blogging about
• Make available for free a theme, plugin or piece of software
• Start a meme that others can replicate and that links back to you (e.g. buttons/stickers/tools for bloggers/webmasters to post on their sites, contests, quizzes, surveys, etc.)

Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.

MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.

I finally bought a leather couch a couple weeks ago. Nothing says ‘acclaimed author’ like sliding off a leather loveseat as you type on a laptop – sliding because you’re still in sweats and it hasn’t been broken in.

Anyway.

Ron and I went couch shopping and on our way stopped by Sleep City mattress store in Chicago on Diversey Avenue because we wanted to see about getting him a box spring and a bedframe. We’d been to this store a year ago to get him a mattress and returned this past summer to get me a mattress, box spring and bed frame. The guy at Sleep City set me up with a supah-soft Englander mattress that is like sleeping on a freakin’ cloud. Money well spent.

Anyway.

I wrote a quick entry about this Chicago mattress store on my personal blog and how fantastic the service was, how affordable the prices were and how I generally just had a great experience there (compared to the over-price place just a block away).

Recently, I’m at the gym and a guy we know comes up to me and says ‘Oh, I stopped off at that mattress store you recommended and got a bed.’ Strange, I hadn’t mentioned to Sean about the store. ‘Oh yeah, he’s got that review from you posted at his store.’ Strange, I hadn’t mentioned to Sean about my blog.

So Ron and I go into Sleep City and we’re talking to the guy about the bed frame when Ron spots my blog post. Printed out on the guy’s desk. ‘Look honey, this is your post!’ The salesman then says, ‘You’re Andy! You wouldn’t believe how many people have come in because of that review – and how many people know you!’

Sidestory: I have a massage therapist that I highly recommend back from my structural integration (aka Rolfing) days. I blogged about him too and I get at least one email a month of someone inquiring for his contact info. He recently called to thank me for the referrals.

This is why local businesses should blog. Or give discounts to bloggers in exchange for reviews and posting. You don’t have to be in a ‘techie’ business. If you aren’t findable online you’re dead. Blogs are word-of-mouth made trackable, searchable and archived.
Bonus sidestory: I’m walking out of my apartment building when a car horn honks and I hear somebody yelling my name. I go up to the car and meet two guys I’ve never met before. ‘We though it was you. We love your podcast!’ Then there was the time I got recognized in a local diner for having a blog. You never know your reach…

This is why you should be blogging. To forge meaningful relationships globally and locally. Bloggers can help new customers find you, a blog can help you find new customers.

VistaPrint first gained fame as the company that would send you a few hundred business cards for free. And so a million small businesses ordered the free cards and would eagerly scatter them to prospects, clients and colleauges. The caveat was that the back of the business cards said Get your own free business cards at VistaPrint.com. These spankin’ new business cards told the recipients the business’s contact info but also that they were too cheap to drop a whole thirty dollars on custom made business cards that advertised their business, not VistaPrint’s.

And so anytime a business uses dirt cheap or half-assed solutions for their business, I call it The VistaPrint Syndrome. This is beyond starting business on a shoestring or bootstrapping… You’re starting it on a stale ricecake, an eye booger and a dream.

And so it is with Blogger. I roll my eyes every time a business announces their new business blog and the address is at blogspot.com. I’ve been accused of being a blog bigot for telling clients to not use Blogger under any circumstances. Using Blogger and the free Blog*Spot hosting is basically telling the rest of the world that you’re too cheap to spend a few dollars for a halfway decent blog for your business. You’re too cheap to pay for web hosting, too cheap to pay for a 1-click install of WordPress, too cheap to pay for a domain-mapped TypePad blog. Business bloggers who use Blogger/Blog*Spot are telling the rest of the world not to take them seriously.

Sure it is just a blog. Blogs are supposed to be fun. Cheap and free was the initial allure of blogs. That was great at the beginning. I expect this same trend to eventually apply to WordPress.com once newbies figure out that the .com is the free hosted product and the .org is the free installable software – hopefully by the .com will have domain mapping.

Having a Blog*Spot blog and expecting someone to be impressed is like having a Yellow Pages listing and expecting them to go Oh. Wow. Shocker. You’re listed in the phone book.

Solutions?

1. Buy a domain name, get hosting for it, publish with Blogger to your own domain name.
2. Move your blog to a service like TypePad or BlogHarbor and domain map it.
3. Date/marry/hookup with a geek, have them install WordPress, Movable Type or TextPattern for you and be done with it. And then dump/divorce them if necessary.

If we want business blogs to be taken seriously we have to raise our expectations of our blogs and the newbies just starting out. Each time some company says Go to our blog at yadda-yadda dot blogspot dot com we should all feel as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Final word: I love VistaPrint. They are a great service and their express shipping option is a dream. I love Blogger. I started with them five years ago with my personal blog.

For the past couple of days I’ve been playing around with a trial version of Blogbeat, a real time blog traffic reporting system. So far I’ve been really impressed.

You can drill down to find out what your most popular posts are, how people found them (search engines, other sites, etc.), and track your search page rank.

Unlike Google Analytics (assuming you were one of the few who signed up for Google Analytics in the first five minutes before they shut the door), Blogbeat provides the information in real time. It took me about 5 minutes to install the script on my blog and minutes later I was seeing the traffic reports.

Once you’ve logged in Blogbeat also offers some common results in simple language: “which posts were most popular today?” and “who sent the most visitors my way?” are a couple. Finding out what search terms are attracting visitors is also a click away.
You can also even subscribe to the reports via RSS.

My only complaint is about the user interface. The information is easy to understand, but the font is a little big (too much scrolling required) and there are too many words in different shades of light grey. Also, it wasn’t always clear what report I was going to see when I drilled down a certain path.

If you’re looking for inexpensive traffic report solution ($6/mo for up to 500,000 monthly page views) and you want something with more cowbell–don’t ask–Blogbeat may be just what you’re looking for.

Since blogs are technically web sites with feeds, (ok, I’m simplifying just a bit), then there is no reason a blog cannot be effectively marketed like a web site. To this end, Stephan made a great post about optimizing this blog, pointing out some important tips that bloggers would do well to follow.

In my experience working with both search engine optimization and blog marketing, I’ve found that there are more ways to market a blog than a site without a feed. A few of the many resources to help you do this include:

RSS Button Maker – This nifty tool created by Thomas McMahon allows you to fill in your blog name, url and feed url and pick the buttons you want to create. Hit submit and it will output the code for about 20 or so RSS feed reader/aggregator RSS subscription buttons with your feed information embedded. Then all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your blog template.

A study performed by Ipsos-Insight sponsored by Yahoo (pdf) indicated that RSS feed subscription buttons or “chicklets” are the preferred way for users to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed.

This tool also creates the code for several social bookmark services to make it easier for your readers to add your blog to del.icio.us, digg, slashdot or furl.net. Should your blog get bookmarked enough, it may make the “popular” list from one of these services and that can drive significant amounts of traffic.

RSS to Email Tools: FeedBlitz and R|mail – Sign up for these services and then place the code in the template of your blog. Visitors can opt to receive your posts via email. At first I wondered, why would anyone do that? RSS is so much more convenient. I can say from personal experience, 1/3 of the daily visitors to my own blog choose this option and we’ve had similar rates with blog marketing clients. Those are blog visitors you might not have otherwise had.

Monster Blog Directory Submission List – This list shows the “add a blog” or “add your feed” urls for over 80 different blog and RSS search engines and directories. The list gets edited monthly to add new sites or to edit urls. One of the advantages to having a blog as part of your company web site is that with a feed, you can get your site listed in these directories or search engines and a site sans feed cannot.

One thing I will note, is that blog marketing tools are only as effective as the quality of the content on the site they are being used to promote. There is no substitute for quality content and also the social networks between communities of like-minded blogs to draw traffic.

Separate articles, same theme. First Darren writes about the truism that most Internet users don’t realize that they are reading a blog and might be turned off but continual references to to “on this blog … ” kind of things.

In my work as a blog consultant I run into this often. Blogs aren’t really well understood by the majority of Internet users. How is it different from a website (it isn’t really)? Isn’t just an online journal (yes, and no)? None of my friends, colleagues, target audience read blogs (they probably do, they just don’t know it).

Darren concludes with this …

I think their observation is correct. While I’m not suggesting bloggers need to dumb down their blogging I think the mind-shift of moving from writing for other bloggers to writing for ‘normal people’ (I can see bloggers everywhere scrolling down to the comments section after that phrase) is one worth making for most bloggers.

This means getting out of our own little Pro Blogging Ghetto and learning to communicate with others in ways that are accessible and smart – otherwise we limit the potential for our succes

Darren’s overall suggestions are bang on, IMHO. Bloggers, especially professional bloggers and bloggers who are going for information, news, etc need to be aware that people are looking for good stuff to read, learn, and use and don’t give a rodent’s tushie that it’s a blog.

Now, published about the same time are 21 great writing/blogging tips from Make You Go Hmm:

1. Provide more, not less, original content in the blog entries.
2. Find things you are insatiably curious about and write with full-on passion.
3. Rather than make 10 so-so posts every day, make 3-5 really good ones.
4. Can’t find the solution to a problem in the search engines easily? How-to/fixes/solutions make great topics.
5. Give away something once in awhile.
6. Start blogging about subjects that aren’t already being blogged to death, or write about them with a fresh perspective.
7. Pay a professional if you suck at graphics and design.
8. Don’t use too much Flash.
9. Don’t slap a bunch of flashy banners and buttons (no matter how small) all over the place.
10. Use a smaller, less gaudy logo.
11. Make sure at least some content (not logo, not header, not advertising, etc) shows on every webpage without browser scroll
12. Provide consistent navigation.
13. Do include a byline and author bio so it’s clear to readers who wrote the content
14. Always disclose conflicts of interest
15. Clearly mark or define advertising placement
16. Don’t cripple the RSS feed.
17. Liberally blend with descriptive text: pictures, screenshots, audio (podcast), video and any other items that will help keep the readers interested, informed, enlightened and/or entertained.
18. Keep an open dialogue with commenters and two-way trackbackers.
19. Don’t let flamers destroy the community.
20. Are you having fun?
21. The last tip is probably my most favorite: don’t be afraid to write something and not publish it.

I think (almost) all of these are super tips … maybe every pro blogger should print them out and stick near their computer (hard for me, because I usually work from the couch and friends visiting might comment on my “unique” taste in wall art). The professional design tip is a tough one, that can be expensive. I suggest finding a skookum template to use for your blog. I’ve been setting up a lot of WP 2 blogs lately, and I direct new clients and friends to Alex King’s site to pick a template. There are so many awesome ones there that people have trouble picking an absolute favourite (so I recommend picking 3-4, installing them on the blog and then choosing).

Of course, none of us are perfect. Heck, my blog is rather bland. Which is why, in true blogging style, the 21 tips closes like this:

Can you follow all these tips? Probably not. This blog doesn’t even follow all them, although I do try to keep this stuff in mind when I feel the quality is starting to slip (and it is an every day job working on blog quality, not something one can just go into autopilot on). But follow enough of these and it will greatly increase the likelihood that you’ll become one of the most read blogs out there someday. Let’s face it, the web can never have enough quality content. You can add or take away with each post you make. Want to be a shallow, one dimensional blogger? There’s tons of those. Want to really work at your writing and make it better? This post is for you.

Tags: blogging tips, professional blogging, blog design, blog writing

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