In my neck of the woods, a new school year is starting and parents are collectively rejoicing as kids head back for another year of learning. The timing seems right for a blogging back to school post!
With that in mind, following is a refresher on the fundamentals for successful blogging:
1. Publish useful content.
This fundamental rule of successful blogging applies not only to the content in your blog posts but also to the content in your blog comments and across the social web. Make sure it’s useful or no one will read it, share it or talk about it.
2. Avoid things that make you look like a spammer.
Go light on the links, disclose paid posts and ads, and don’t crowd people’s in boxes. In other words, be honest and play nice.
3. Give credit where credit is due.
Cite your sources. If you quote content from another website or blog, link back to that site or blog as the original source. If you use an image with a creative commons license that requires attribution, make sure you link back to the owner of that image.
4. Follow the laws.
Claiming ignorance won’t get you off the hook if you’re caught breaking the law. Make sure you don’t plagiarize, and only use images, audio and video that have the proper copyrights and usage permissions attached to them that allow you to legally do so. If you publish paid posts or reviews on your blog, make sure you follow the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 16 Title 255.
5. Remember your words live online for a long time.
Don’t publish content on your blog or elsewhere online that you might regret later. What you publish today can be found in Google searches for many, many years. Even your Twitter updates are archived by the Library of Congress!
Remember those rules you learned in grade school about being nice to others, being respectful, listening, taking turns, and so on? They apply to us as adults, and even to bloggers and online publishers, just as much now as they did when we were children. Follow those golden rules you learned in kindergarten, and you should be just fine.
Are you still following the blogging basics or is it time to go back to school?
When was the last time you read your blog’s About page? It’s easy to forget that page when you’re busy writing fresh blog posts, but your About page is one of the most important destinations on your blog. When visitors land on a post in your blog, they’re likely to read the content, possibly click through to read some more posts if they like what they found, and then what do you think they do? They check out your About page to see who is behind all of this great content!
Everyone knows what being a blogger entails but fewer people know what creating a successful blog involves. Far too many bloggers have fallen for the false mantra of “If you write it, they will come” only to watch their traffic, readership and even profits lag behind their efforts.
Did you know that sites which load quickly get higher search engine keyword rankings thereby getting more search traffic to their sites than slow-loading sites? It’s true for your blog, too. Even Google has admitted that fast load times equate to higher search rankings. However, most bloggers haven’t taken the time to evaluate their blogs’ load times.
Any decent relationship is built on trust. Without it, you have nothing more than two people in a room. Violate it…and you’ll spend a lifetime working (often unsuccessfully) to get it back. Earning and maintaining the trust of a significant other is hard enough, but a bloggers’ job is even tougher. You need to earn/maintain the trust of an audience.