Best Blogging Practices

author: Josh Katherman

In today’s post we’re covering the best blogging practices that one can implement to ensure quality content and “linkability” in every post.  There’s too many plugins and modifications to list in one post, so I’m just touching the major ways you can improve your “code of conduct” when creating and authoring your blog.  Your visitor always comes first!  Find out how they’re getting to your site and what they’re doing when they get there.  Create points of interest and call to actions that provide the best service to your visitors, and to increase the popularity of your blog.

Make every post count

Write every post like it’s going to be viewed on a resume, or a publishing company.  Make sure you have pictures that generalize what the post is about.  Write your posts in the most readable formats using header tags and unordered lists to break up and categorize the information in your article.  Write your articles so when you’re finished with them you take a look back at it and say “that’s a great article!”.  Write every post to standards that you’re proud of the end-content.

Give your readers a reason to share

Useful information.  This sums it up quite well.  Readers need a reason to want to share all the knowledge and information you’re providing to them, so make sure you’re not writing 300 word articles that are titled “how to make a website”.  While the topic IS useful, it’s been covered so many times that it will be hard to provide new, useful information on how to make a website.  And that’s what you need in your articles, you need new and alternatively opinionated content that makes people think and learn.

Give your readers the tools to share

Great content obviously plays a huge role in producing link-worthy articles, but if you don’t give your visitors the tools they need to easily share and distribute your content, they won’t!  Or at least not nearly as much as they would if given the proper tools.  Use social bookmarking scripts and plugins to provide easy linking to popular social media and bookmarking sites.  Sociofluid provides a great customizable script for this purpose.   Provide a “digg” or “retweet” button beside every posts content to let your visitors easily promote and share the content you worked so hard to create.

Speaking of digg and twitter..

Sign up and interact!  In today’s world of search engine optimization (and with google’s introduction of social media in their serps) it’s essential that you create an identity on major social media and bookmarking websites.  There isn’t an easier way to share and promote your content than clicking “tweet”, providing your have followers of course .  Digg is a little different; Unless you have a super intriguing article or a bunch of friends on digg, you’ll most likely never see the front page.  But nonetheless it’s a good idea to spread your content over every aspect of the web that you can.

Stick to one general topic

While there are exceptions in every niche, you’ll mostly want to stick to one general “theme” of information.  The more categories you have about random things, the more polluted and dissolved your information will be in the eyes of search engines.  A site that’s dedicated to a specific topic or niche, and has numerous subcategories of information on that particular niche will be viewed as a more important website.

Build a community

Every blog owner wants a loyal community of followers and fans.  This is achieved by well.. being a loyal blog owner!  Interact with your viewers, make them think and want to share their opinions.  Make things like commenting on articles, forums, and subscribing, EASY tasks that are all within a clicks reach from any page on your blog.  There’s also a number of Wordpress plugins that you can use to help build a community, the most popular being BuddyPress.

What are some other methods of blogging that you’ve implemented that have improved your blog’s community or share-ability levels?  I’d love to hear about them!

Tags: blog practices, improve your blog

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Blog Improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.