Top 20 tips for a successful blog

[Eklavya]

Hi friends,

After a very long time I am posting something here. I hope to post regularly in future. One of my friend recently sent me this useful summary of a successful blog. Hope it'll be of some help to all of you.

1. Pick a topic for your blog

2. Encourage comments

3. Make it easy to subscribe

4. Include an About page

5. Present your ideas visually

6. Keep posts short and to the point

7. Use subheadings for long posts

8. Link abundantly

9. Make headlines descriptive

10. Archive by topic

11. Include a list of related posts beneath each post

12. Allow users to contact you offline

13. Present your real viewpoint

14. Write for your future employer

15. Include a Top Posts section

16. Provide an index

17. Get your own URL and match it to your blog’s title

18. Include a Recent Posts section in your sidebar

19. Reward commenters for commenting

20. Post often

[JosephRatliff]

[Eklavya]

Thanks Joseph for adding this useful tip to the list. Of all these 21 points I think that the 20th one is quite a problem for majority for bloggers : 'Post often'. Yet in my opinion it is the most important tip of all.

[JosephRatliff]

I couldn't agree more...

I try to post a minimum of once a week on my blog, The Profitable Business Edge.

Sometimes I post more than that...but once a week is the minimum.

[theuniek1]

There's one very important point missing...

22. Market your blog.

Blogs make it so easy to forget that there actually needs to be some promotional effort -- it's rarely a case of "build it and they will come". Let's face it, your blog is pretty useless if no one reads it (unless, that's the goal of the blog in the first place).

~ Teli

[JosephRatliff]

That is sooo correct Teli

A good resource along the lines of marketing your blog is:

http://www.feedburner.com

They have a number of tools that can help make your blog "viral" in a sense...I have used them myself with great rewards.

[Lynn Terry]

For marketing and blogs, I use and search engine optimization. You can use a good combination of marketing techniques (and should!) but these two are my primary focus.

ClickNewz ranks #2 on Google for Internet Marketing Blog, for example.

[theuniek1]

Joe and Lynn have made some seriously great points - marketing a blog doesn't have to be hard work. It's one of the great things about blogs in general.

1. Feed optimization and marketing
2. Social marketing (which includes participating in the community)
3. Traditional marketing methods, including directory submissions (plus there are a number of blog specific directories)

With just those three methods above, you can generate a ton of traffic. Imagine if you actually put some additional effort into it.

By the way, this is a great topic. Definitely looking forward to other contributions as well.

~ Teli

[JosephRatliff]

Ok...I will throw another tool into the ring for marketing blogs...

http://www.pingomatic.com

You use it to "ping" the major blog directories when you update your blog with new posts...and this can help you gain additional traffic.

Also...

There is a sort of secret to doing the same thing with Google sitemaps...

Submit your RSS feed as a Google sitemap, and Google will visit your blog more often to look for new content. Make sure if you use this, that you do update your blog often...or Google will not visit as much.

But that is not all to this secret...

After submitting your RSS Feed sitemap, use the format below in your address bar...substituting your blog address and RSS feed extension where I have bolded:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitema ... p%3A%2F%2Fprofitablebusinessedge.blogspot.com%2Fatom.xml

Save this newly created link into your favorites...and every time you update your blog, click on this new link in your favorites...and you will tell Google's bot to search your blog.

Automatically.


Well, I know this was a little technical, and I am not good at explaining tech stuff...but I hope someone can use this.

This trick increased the traffic to my blog three times over.

Enjoy.

[Lynn Terry]

[JosephRatliff]

Lynn,


A combination of organic results and the fact that Google's bot is visiting more often to see my site...making it more popular.

That is my educated guess based on looking at where my traffic is coming from anyhow.

[Lynn Terry]

Yes, the more they visit, the more quickly your new content gets indexed, which is a plus. I find that frequent posting - or frequent updates/additions to a static site even - will cause this to happen naturally.

A blog post I published 2 days ago is already indexed, for example. That's pretty quick.

[JosephRatliff]

And using this little set up above...

Typically...any post I create is indexed within the same day or the next day.