Blogging Things You Should Do And Things You Should Not

Many moons ago I read an interesting post at Coding Horror regarding the “deadly sins” of blogging “ the things you should never do. On the whole I agreed with them “ I have repeated a few below for the interest and amusement of others: Do not use calendar widgets. They are useless. Do not use tag cloud widgets. They are useless. Do not include random photographs within a post that are not directly related to a post. Unless you have a colossal readership, allow comments. Do not post lists (like this one) Do not post about blogging (like this post “ yes, I find this rather humorous too). With the above list in mind, I started thinking about the things you should do, and in no particular order came up with the following; Write regularly, but only if you have something to write about Use RSS Syndication. Most blogging platforms offer the opportunity to publish your writing as an RSS feed. Make sure a link to the RSS feed is prominent on all pages. Most people use feed aggregators to keep up-to-date with the various blogs and news services they regularly read “ give them the means to use those services. Use friendly URLs. If the blogging solution you use has the capability to use URL rewriting in order to make links to posts within your blog more friendly, use it. It helps search engines index your pages. Do not thread drift. This harks back to the days of usenet, and bulletin boards. Keep your blog posts focussed on a specific subject “ unless you are shooting the breeze in a lifestream, a second subject should be a second post. Use pingback services. Many blogging platforms have the capability to inform blog-specific directories such as Google Blog Search, Sphere or Technorati of your new posts. If you don’t have this feature, look into services such as Feedburner which will do it for you. Read other peoples blogs,and comment on them. If you are looking for readership, or to network with others in the same subject-space, contributing views and content to other blogs is a good thing to do. Cross-post into social networks. If you regularly use a social network such as Facebook, or Twitter, if the service doesn’t allow you to automatically import an RSS feed, cross-post relevant posts into the social network. It takes a minute to do, and shares your writing with those who might otherwise not see it. If you have any further tips or advice to people writing blogs, feel free to share them.