So, you are ready to start blogging. But where to start? How to make sure your blog is legitimate, and your name is not distructed by a post? Remember, once your post becomes indexed by search engines, there is no way back. So, be very careful when you are blogging for your business.
“DOs”?
- Use descriptive headlines that reveal the point of the article without further reading - no more than 70 characters, including spaces
- Use lists, images, tables, sub-headlines, examples, indented notes, indented quotes, icons, colors, bold and italics to lighten up your article and make it easier to scan it (no more than 3 links toward your site per post, no more than 3 images per post)
- Narrow your blog posts to no more than 600 words (larger blogs should be divided to form subsections with their own titles)
- Write in inverted pyramid style: first get to the point and mention the core ideas, then fill in the details in later paragraphs
- Cross-link your posts with other’s posts. The first link is the one most people click on, so it should also be the main link for your article. Also, too many links too close to each other diffuse your point and make you less of a filter, and a (news) blog should always be a filter for others
- Credit your sources with a mention and link
- Build your post around a question, or several questions that are not fully answered through your post – leave a room for comments, even if you do not expect them (i.e. try to drive discussion). Open questions are the best to get great quality answers, i.e. "What do you think?", but they can be intimidating
- No hard selling of your company's stuff
- Mention other bloggers and their posts, subject related, and provide with the link
- Buzz your marketing Guru, when your post is ready for proper on and off-site optimization of it (adding tags, file clean-up)
- Rely on Surveys, statistics, etc.
- Focus on industry, not on your company in particular
- Use simple words not dense text, everyday language
- Mark updates and changes (and do update and change when readers find - something wrong in your writing)
- Spell check your posts, and read them for clarity once or twice before posting
- Ask for people to comment, you are more likely to get comments if you ask for them. Sometimes people don't comment just because they can't! Make sure the comment form is obvious and easy to use.
- Also do not take the visitor to a different site in order to comment.
- Observe - Note the topics people often comment on, there might be a trend. Just be observant. Be on the lookout for topics people comment on and write about them
© 2009 Sasha Grebenyuk
