Advice for New Bloggers

If you are starting a career on blogging, making money out of it, or you simply want to write your own personal blogs, the following tips can help you get started:

1. Deciding to Blog.  Start a blog when you find something you feel strongly about and that you feel personally connected to. As Cathy Moore would say, "A good sign that it's time to start your blog is when you leave long comments on other people's blogs and still want to say more."
2. Learning the Terrain.  Get comfortable with the genre and study the craft of blogging and learn from the experts. Writing blogs is a distinctly different field and it pays to get acquainted with it first. You may also look within your niche to see who everyone else seems to link to.
3. Build it and they will come. You may not have a huge reader base when you start. Be passionate about your topic and stick with, soon you can begin to develop an audience.
4. Getting started with your blog.
   
   • Bronwyn Mauldin suggests getting together a week's worth of posts before launching it. Space them out at one post per week.
   • Cathy Moore warns to not get too hung up on tweaking your design.
   • Cathy Moore also suggests not getting too worked up about blogging platforms. You may check out Blogger or Vox if you are just trying things out. They're the easiest to get up and running, especially during experimental stages.
   • Check out the tips from Darren Rowse's Starting a Blog - What We Wish We Knew 
     

101 Essential Blogging Skills by Robin Reagler

Exceptional bloggers have the ability to…

1. Be unique. Give your readers something no one else can give.
2. Write dirty. Readers can’t form a relationship with information alone.
3. Acknowledge feedback. Never let an email go unanswered, even if you write back to say you don’t have the time to answer right now!
4. Omit unnecessary words.
5. Weave outbound links into your content. This will add another layer of depth to what you write.
6. Be consistent. Establish a blogging rhythm readers can follow.
7. Be vulnerable. Get to know readers on a personal level.
8. Recognize opportunities and take them.
9. Keep an orderly and constructive comments section.
10. Write captivating headlines without resorting to hyperbole.
11. Listen to feedback, both positive and negative.
12. Acknowledge when you have made a mistake.
13. Have the courage to reverse bad decisions, even if you invested time, effort or money in them.
14. Be prepared to invest considerable time into one post.
15. Format text for clarity and readability.
16. Write posts which can be scanned, but:
17. Be gripping. Encourage readers to consume every word.
18. Approach existing ideas in new ways.
19. Recognize which blog elements are useful and which elements are clutter.
20. Understand social media.
21. Give without expecting to receive.
22. Avoid self-indulgence. Blog selfishly.
23. Stay motivated. Find a way to satisfy both your readers and yourself.
24. Communicate with other bloggers.
25. Do not close yourself off from competitors. Learn from them.
26. Answer every question that comes your way.
27. Be resilient in the face of personal attacks and criticism.
28. Embrace simplicity.
29. Pay attention to what others write about your blog. You can learn a lot from it.
30. Don’t be afraid to say a lot in just a few words. Length does not directly correlate with meaning.
31. Be ambitious. Don’t under-sell your abilities.
32. Be audacious. Innovate, experiment, create a spectacle.
33. Demonstrate why you’re an expert.
34. Care about spelling, grammar and expression.
35. Break out of generic looking themes. Be visually unique.
36. Use stories and anecdotes effectively and to illustrate a point.
37. Disagree with others respectfully and convincingly.
38. Spend time constructing links into your blog.
39. Get involved in your niche. Comment on other blogs writing on your topic and become part of the community there.
40. Take an interest in your commenters. Respond to them, visit their blogs, offer assistance or answers.
41. Create a navigable list of categories. 10-15 provides a balance between specificity and usability.
42. Select images which help convey the meaning of your posts. Differentiate between images with relevance and pure eye-candy.
43. Give credit where credit is due. It’s better to reference and acknowledge sources too often rather than too little.
44. Provide archives. It can be disorienting not to know how long a blog has been in existence. Some readers prefer chronology to category.
45. Carefully mind your reputation. Be conscious of the way you conduct yourself in spaces outside your blog.
46. Develop a unique logo or icon for yourself or your site.
47. Do more than aggregate and post links. Even if you are pointing elsewhere, make yourself and your reactions the central focus.
48. Don’t link out to the same sites again and again. This makes it easy for readers to skip you and go straight to the source.
49. Be honest about your shortcomings.
50. Feed the need for self-improvement. Help your readers become better at something.
51. If something has been said before, don’t say it again. Conveying the same meaning in different words is not new content.
52. Build a collection of links you could use to support future blog posts.
53. Return favors. Help those who help you.
54. Develop a basic knowledge of HTML. You will be surprised how many opportunities you have to use it, either to tweak your template or gain control of your blog posts.
55. Read great writing. It will lift the way you write.
56. Write ahead. Always keep a few posts unpublished for periods of busyness, laziness, or emergencies. This will help ensure real life does not negatively affect your blog.
57. Keep organized. Make notes of blogging to-dos, develop schedules and stick to them. You will be much more productive with a structure in place.
58. Write guest posts. You will be surprised at the opportunities a solid idea and a polite email can open up for you.
59. Offer to help other bloggers. Aside from possible indirect benefits, it’s just good karma.
60. Understand that whitespace is not wasted space. A blog full of ’stuff’ is a claustrophobic blog.
61. Differentiate between spam comments or trackbacks and legitimate ones. Delete trackbacks from scrapers. Don’t reward them with backlinks.
62. Understand that you will not succeed by being a doppleganger. The harder you try to make your blog’s content resemble that of a more popular blog, the more likely readers are to head to the original instead.
63. Make it easy for readers to submit your articles to social media, but don’t over complicate the process.
64. Be prepared to part with widgets that do not benefit your readers.
65. Understand the value of social proof, as well as the damage caused by its absence.
66. Be transparent. Disclose your biases and affiliations, particularly when it comes to potential profit.
67. Recognize when advertisements are negatively impacting on your blog. Be willing to part with or change them if necessary.
68. Understand that there is a simple correlation between the effort poured into a blog and its quality. There is no secret to popularity; it is achieved mainly by hard work.
69. Don’t measure your success against the achievement of goals you have no direct control over. Traffic levels, RSS subscribers and Technorati rank are all outside your control. Aim to achieve goals for which the only variable is you.
70. Keep track of milestones. The result will be something you can look to whenever your morale is low.
71. Understand the true worth of traffic statistics. Once you do that, you’ll realize there’s no benefit to be had in checking them more than once per day.
72. Don’t sit in your blog’s email account. Check it once in the morning and once at night. If you are not sticking comments in moderation you can cut this down to once per day.
73. Strike a balance between blogging and real-world commitments. Don’t sacrifice what’s important for the sake of your blog, as this is a surefire way to cripple your motivation in the long-term.
74. Brainstorm ideas in advance. Don’t think of a topic as you stare at the blank screen. Make the most of times when you are inspired and develop a catalog of post ideas you can browse as soon as you have the time to write.
75. Ignore tradition. Don’t be hampered by established ideas on what a blog, or a blog in your niche, can be.
76. Overcome the taboo against banning commenters, if necessary. Most of us, thankfully, will never have to consider this, but some will. If a commenter is doing nothing but making your comments section a horrible place to be, or continuously bothering you, be willing to reject their comments. The belief they have in being able to say whatever they want is not worth more than the happiness of you and your readers.
77. Focus on what you’re good at. You will gain more by utilizing your strengths than trying to develop weak skills into something half decent.
78. Recognize that most ideas are simply new combinations of old ideas.
79. Learn from other bloggers. Ask questions of those you admire.
80. Read blogs outside your niche. They will teach you new ways of doing things.
81. Read feeds quickly and efficiently. This will allow you to extract the maximum amount of information in a minimum of time.
82. Be a source of solid knowledge. Before presenting something as true, make sure you have verified the facts.
83. Don’t focus on generating links at the expense of value. Lately I’ve seen a number of blogs hold contest after contest. The bloggers were so busy promoting them that they stopped creating actual content! You are not moving anywhere if, for every new reader you gain, an existing one becomes disillusioned with your blog.
84. Use numbered headlines in moderation. Too many can fatigue readers and decrease their impact.
85. Avoid making unsupported claims. If you pull statistics out of the air for the sake of grabbing attention, readers may become skeptical about your honesty.
86. Choose the right words. You don’t need to be Hemingway, but putting effort into the way you express yourself will pay off.
87. Suggest, don’t command. There is a difference between giving advice and presenting what you write as the be all and end all. I have seen a number of bloggers giving advice while simultaneously implying there will be negative consequences for not following it (you will lose lots of subscribers, for example). Be aware that you are not the supreme authority on how things should be done, because readers certainly will be.
88. Be involved with your commenters. If you don’t have time to respond to each comment, at least acknowledge those who’ve put significant effort or thought into their responses. There is nothing worse than spending time on something only to have it ignored.
89. Allow readers to search your blog. A search bar is incredibly easy to implement and the result is a powerful tool for your users.
90. Be aware of SEO, but don’t let it control you.
91. Get involved in a forum relevant to your topic. This is a simple way to build your public profile and promote your blog. It’s enjoyable, too.
92. Don’t go on hiatus or ‘take a break’ from blogging. Many bloggers experience times when their passion for blogging wanes. Rather than going on hiatus commit yourself to low-intensity blogging for the duration of the slump (links, short posts, and so on). Many blog readers see the word ‘hiatus’ or ‘break’ as a euphemism for ‘I’ve given up blogging’. A few easy posts here and there will show them that you’re still thinking about the blog.
93. Weigh up effort required vs. reward. Your time is precious, so be mindful to use it on the tasks which provide strong returns. For example, five guest posts on new blogs is unlikely to yield the same rewards as a single guest post on a highly trafficked blog.
94. Bring the most important details to the top of your About page. Your credentials should come before anything else, because this is what new visitors to your About page are most interested to know.
95. Subscribe to your own feed and make sure it is in good health.
96. Chat to your readers. Allow them to add you to your instant messenger service of choice. You can develop a more solid relationship in five minutes chatting than you can across a series of emails.
97. Be inventive with how you promote your blog. Brainstorm new strategies for generating inbound links, though you should always ensure they are ethical.
98. Be observant. When you see content which has become popular, ask yourself why. Consider how you could adapt these characteristics to the content you create.
99. Ask questions of your readers. It is difficult to give your readers what they want when you don’t know what that is. Don’t spend hours trying to guess what that could be. Ask them! Most of the time they will be more than happy to tell you.
100. Avoid being stubborn. If you consistently receive complaints or negative feedback about an aspect of your blog, consider scrapping it — regardless of how dear it is to you.
101. Murder your darlings. Not everything you write will be great. Not every word or paragraph you commit to the screen should be kept. Learn to mercilessly cut out writing that is sub-standard, even if it means scrapping an entire post and starting again.
     

Pablo Pabla's 25 Points for Beginning Bloggers

1. If you don’t wish to spend money, start out with one of the many free-blogging platforms available. Two popular ones are Blogger and Wordpress. Signing up is easy.
2. Decide what you want to blog about. Is it going to be on selected topics or a mixed-bag of subjects?
3. Think of an appropriate name for your blog. Make the name as short as possible so that people can remember it. You wouldn’t want a domain name which sounds like “personallifestrugglesofjohnsmith.blogspot.com”. “Johnsmith.blogspot.com” would be a better choice.
4. Once you have got your domain name registered (and hosting), choose a nice and relevant looking theme. Try to choose a theme which at least resembles the kind of blog is being represented. A flowery looking theme does not look macho on a blog about cars.
5. Customise the blog if you have the skills to do so. Any bit of customizing makes the blog look different from the rest. Make it stand out and be memorable to your readers.
6. The recent design trend for blogs is minimalism. Remove useless widgets / features like Calenders or Recent Posts. Archives are also out of date. Statistics counters are also a thing of the past and so are widgets showing rankings. No matter what statistics or ranking you are putting, there are thousands of blogs out there which outrank you. So, better not embarrass yourself, especially when you are starting new. Categories are of better use. Leave them on.
7. Try to visualize what sub-topics will you be posting about. Say, if you wish to blog about cars, perhaps you might want to create sub-topics / categories according to make of cars. Visualizing the categories give you a direction for the blog and keeps your blog relevant to the theme.
8. Choose a killer tagline for your blog. This is a short sentence just below the Title of the blog to tell readers (especially the new ones) what this blog is all about.
9. Take time to author your “About” page. This is probably the most read page or information on a blog. People generally want to know who is the author behind the blog. So, tell you readers who you are, why you are blogging, why they should find your blog interesting and what can they expect from your blog.
10. Make sure there is information on how people can contact you. But don’t be so naive as to leave your telephone number or address. An email would do. Better if you can use a contact form.
11. Start blogging but try not to tell anyone yet. Yes, it is difficult to contain your excitement when you’ve got a new blog running but you wouldn’t want your visitors to come over to your blog just to see one post. Write a few posts before “launching” your blog.
12. Consider adding an image to the post if it will further describe or aid your content delivery. Make sure the image is relevant to the content and that you have checked the copyright permissions. You wouldn’t want to start your blogging venture infringing someone else’s copyright, would you?
13. Decide whether you want to align your contents left or justified. Aligning to the right or centred does not make good reading. Put proper paragraphing and ensure readability of the contents. If you have trouble reading your own contents, chances are the others would also.
14. Check your grammar and spelling. Or you can always copy your contents onto a text editor like Microsoft Word to do the necessary.
15. Before you publish the post, check whether the Title to the post is relevant and catchy. First impressions count. So, make the best of it.
16. Check your feed URL. Register with Feedburner to burn your feed so that readers can subscribe to your blog’s feed. Subscribe to your own feed to see that it is working fine.
17. Once you are ready to tell others about your blog, it’s time to market your blog. Use ping services like ping-o-matic, ipings or autopinger. This will ping the search engines and the like that your blog is alive and has been updated.
18. Search for forums which are relevant to your blog. If you blog is about cars, find a forum which focuses on the car industry. Sign up and participate in the forum. Add your blog’s URL in your signature.
19. Sign up with social media sites like Thoof, StumbleUpon or Digg. Make new friends there and start giving the thumbs up to sites which you find newsworthy. Give generously and you will receive in due course.
20. Sign up with blog directories or networks and post your blog URL there. The downside to this is that most of the terms of service require you to place a widget or some form of link back in your site. Most readers of blogs have no regard to these widgets or links and will find them as pure “stuffs” which clutter the look of a blog.
21. Visit other bloggers of similar interest and if you find them interesting, bookmark them or subscribe to their feed. Leave genuine comments on their posts where relevant or appropriate. Cultivate friendship. If they are interested, they will also visit your blog.
22. Reply to comments made on your posts. If they are comment spams, delete them. Enable comment moderating if you can but try not to enable registration and the like before comment is allowed. Many blog readers read many other blogs and have little time to spend on your blog registering just to place a comment.
23. Try to blog on a regular schedule if you can, like a post every 2 days, etc. For beginners, I would recommend a post every 2 or 3 days. If you can write more frequently, well and good. Just don’t get burnt out. Or worst still, freak out when you have no inspiration to write.
24. If you must add some advertisements like google adsense or affiliate links, cut down on them. Having too many ads, especially for newly established blogs, make it look spammy. And if you really must have these ads, at least take time to align them properly. A blog with badly aligned ads or text is ugly and suggests laziness on the part of the blogger. Well, some might say that perhaps the blogger does not know how to align them as they are newbies. If that is so, they should not put the ads in the first place.
25. Most of all, know why you want to blog and enjoy yourself doing it.

References

This documentation was taken from the following references: 

http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/11/advice-for-new-.html

http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/11/maintaining-you.html

http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog/2007/11/reader-question.html

http://www.skelliewag.org/101-essential-blogging-skills-67.htm

http://blogsreview.net/2007/10/30/25-pointers-for-blogging-beginners/