Blogging Is Difficult. Here Are Seven Tips to Help
This post has been updated several times.
In today’s times, blogging is getting increasingly popular. Besides individuals blogging (or tweeting) about what they had for breakfast, corporate blogging is increasing in popularity. To be a successful blogger, there are many things that you need to do correctly.
1) Use Visual Aid Whenever Possible
While search engines won’t care about your images, if everybody wrote websites for search engines and search engines only, nobody would use CSS. Images are a very good way to attract the attention of a person. If writing about hardware, include a picture of the component. If writing about software, include a screenshot. Writing about something else, there are plenty of sources of stock images to use.
2) Don’t Overflow the Reader with Useless Or Boring Posts
Plenty of sources will tell you to blog frequently, but you shouldn’t be filling your blog with content that your readers are not interested in. The ultimate goal is to provide good content on a regular basis. If, at first, you can’t achieve that, go for good content on an irregular basis.
UPDATE: To read some more blogging guidelines that go more into how to create good content, you can check out this Google Blogoscoped post talking about good blog writing style.
UPDATE 5: I found a humorous SlideShare presentation titled “10 Ways to a Killer Blog”. Interestingly enough, there are 15 funny tips.
3) Allow Users to Comment
People love to share their opinions. The internet makes that so much easier. While it will require some additional work for you as you will have to moderate comments, set up anti-spam, etc., your readers will appreciate the ability to add their own tidbits of information and you’ll enjoy getting feedback from your readers.
4) Don’t Slap Ads on There at First
If your blog isn’t really popular yet, don’t put ads on there. Advertising is already annoying, and projects like AdBlock are reducing the advantage of putting ads on your website or blog.
Once you start getting visitors, and the cost of bandwidth is increasing, you could add some non-obtrusive ads to help lower costs.
UPDATE 2: You can check out an Alertbox written by Jakob Nielsen covering the most hated web ad techniques.
5) Don’t Hate the Adblock Users
Plenty of website have started blocking the Firefox user agent, or putting in flashing messages if Adblock is detected. This is bad behavior that will turn away your visitors. You shouldn’t put anything more than a gentle reminder that hosting isn’t free.
6) Link Properly
UPDATE 3: I’m going to link to more of Jakob Nielsen’s work. This time, you might like to read an Alertbox about how to style links properly.
6.1) Don’t Link like This
The method of linking demonstrated above is annoying, as the visitor doesn’t know what they will click on. You are also giving them a barrage of pages to look at, as they might think that they won’t understand your post if they don’t read those pages.
6.2) Don’t Mess with the Status Bar
Don’t use TinyURL to obscure what the link points to or use Javascript to put some unrelated message in the status bar. Give users confidence that they know what they are clicking on. If you make a link that hides what it points to, a user might think it’s a prank with Javascript alerts or a rickroll (Don’t worry. That’s a link to the Wikipedia article).
6.3) Cite Your Sources
Show that you get your information from a credible source. Cite your sources. This will enable your readers to learn more about the topic that you are blogging about as well as prove that you care about accuracy.
7) Pick a Good Design
Content is king, but bad display can weaken the effect of your good content. If you have a hideous color scheme, have way too many files (images, stylesheets, or external Javascript files) slowing down your page’s loading times, or some other thing wrong with your design, your readers are not going to appreciate it.
UPDATE 4: If you are interested in reading a book on good design, you might want to check out The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
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Posted in Best Practices, Blogging, Internet |
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April 29th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Hmm, I violate Section 6.1 all the time, as do Gawker Media’s blogs (Lifehacker being my main exposure to that). Am I a bad blogger?
April 30th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
While plenty of good quality blogs, like Engadget, do that sort of linking, I believe that it isn’t a good idea as I end up with a billion tabs. Reading blogs using that type of linking when I’m on somebody else’s computer that only has Internet Explorer 6 is worse. The taskbar gets all cluttered and everything.
I believe that I even used that linking style once or twice on CE itself, but I’m not a heavy user of it.
May 5th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
In all honesty, I don’t do it more than once every week or two. Probably less in the future, as my posting frequency declines to make room for other (real-life) stuff. I hear you on the IE6 thing.
On a positive note, my mom now uses Firefox 2 and says, “I like Firefox now.” Warms my heart.