The Blog Tips Meme (Volume 2)

Write good titles. They are the first thing peo­ple see and it is what deter­mines whether or not a new reader is going to stick around and read your post.

Whether you use www as part of your domain name or not really doesn’t mat­ter in the long run. But you need to make a deci­sion and stick with it: You are effec­tively dilut­ing your effec­tive­ness to the search engines if you have both since the search engines will treat both as two dif­fer­ent sites. One called www.yourdomain.com and the other one called yourdomain.com. If you stick with one you won’t loose any traf­fic, rank­ing, “points” or sta­tis­tics in the long run.

Have fun with it. It’s great to do seri­ous posts if there’s some­thing you are pas­sion­ate about, but also have fun get­ting to know oth­ers in the com­mu­nity. The best way to do that is to visit other peo­ple and get to know them. If some­one leaves you a com­ment, visit them and com­ment on theirs as well.

Read a lot of blogs. You are not blog­ging alone. The blo­gos­phere is com­posed of mil­lions of peo­ple who have lots to say about so many dif­fer­ent things. You can also get ideas from the arti­cles you read!

Com­ment ver­i­fi­ca­tion vs. com­ment mod­er­a­tion: Per­son­ally, I think com­ment mod­er­a­tion is good for sev­eral rea­sons. First, you can catch all the spam com­ments, and the sec­ond rea­son is you’re able to read com­ments that are posted to archived posts. Some­one had asked me the other day how far back, being on Word­Press, I catch com­ments, and of course that’s one rea­son I love Word­Press: Never miss­ing a comment.

Every­time you write a post and link to another blog you should always send an email to them let­ting them know that you have writ­ten a post and linked to them. This cre­ates a com­mu­nity and they will in turn go to your site to read and most likely add you to their blogroll and/or write a post about you and your blog.

Michelle’s arti­cle enti­tled Ten House­keep­ing Tips for Your Blog is a great tool to help you assess your blog’s strengths and weak­nesses, and “get back to the basics” of blogging.

Stephanie rec­om­mends get­ting some rest When You Run Low on Blog­ging Ideas and You’re Tired. She includes a few other sug­ges­tions in her arti­cle, too, includ­ing ask­ing your read­ers for sug­gested topics.

Look­ing for inspi­ra­tion? Run­ning out of top­ics to write about? Lorelle’s 16 Tips for Blog Idea Brain­storm­ing is a great resource to help you get out of a writ­ing rut.

Dar­ren rec­om­mends that you Run a First Time Reader Audit on Your Blog. Have a friend or rel­a­tive who has never vis­ited your site review it while you watch them and take note of their reac­tions and how easy they find it to nav­i­gate. (Yes, I included Dar­ren in Vol­ume One, as well, but the two arti­cles I’ve high­lighted for you are so help­ful, I did not want you to miss either of them.)

In a series of posts, Yoav explains why you should license your blog’s con­tent using Cre­ative Com­mons.

Kevin recently ran a debate con­test so that his read­ers could sound off about which blog­ging plat­form is bet­ter: Blogspot or Word­Press. If you are try­ing to decide which soft­ware to use, a lot of excel­lent com­ments entered may help you make a decision.

Take a peek at who won the debate on the Word­Press side of the aisle — and $100. Thanks, Kevin!

Sub­mit a guest blog to another blog. Once your post is live, do your best to impress your host by dri­ving traf­fic to the post. Link to it from your blog; encour­age friends, fam­ily and read­ers to visit it and pass it along; and vote for it on social net­works (Stum­ble­Upon is a favorite of mine). If you guest blog often, you can do a weekly roundup post like Lorelle on Word­Press, review­ing your best posts on sev­eral websites.

Want to play?

Tag some friends, post your arti­cle and let me know you are par­tic­i­pat­ing so that I can link to your post!

[tags]Thursday Thirteen[/tags]

Tech­no­rati Tags: Thurs­day Thirteen

On the Same Topic:

• Colloquium’s Best of 2007
• Thir­teen Mem­o­rable (for the Par­ents) Vis­its with Santa Claus
• A Thir­teen Ques­tion His­tory Quiz for Baby Boomers
• Thir­teen Obser­va­tions About Life
• Thir­teen More “Lesser Known” Help­ful Word­Press Plugins