Tips on How to be an Effective Blogger

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How to be an Effective Blogger

There are, perhaps, hundreds, or even thousands, of blogging tips you can find on the Web. Some of them you may already know, some you may not. The following is a consolidated list of tips from some of the more popular bloggers today.

General Guidelines

Use keywords in titles. Imagine how many words a potential reader will use to search in Google to find the information you are writing about. Your title should reflect what you are writing in your blog. Make it catchy, but keep it simple and straight to the point.
Choose your domain name and then a nice relevant-looking theme.
Have a posting schedule and/or goal. This will tell you when your article needs to be finished so you can begin writing another one.
When choosing a posting schedule, look at your current blogging rhythm and base your future goals on it.
Have a blogging routine. The more you write the better you will become as a writer. You may prefer to blog once a week, 3 times a week, or once daily, whatever works best for you.
Make posting goals realistic and achievable. Consider factors like how much time you have to blog, how long your blog posts are, how many posts per day your readers are used to reading, and how much content is out there as a basis for your posts.
Social Bookmarking - Getting your blog noticed. Bookmarking sites have the ability to push vast quantities of visitors around the web. Examples of popular social bookmarking sites include Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Linkfilter.
Convert one off visitors to your blog into regular readers by:
- creating a conversation. Take on a conversation with your readers and be willing to interact with them. Ask questions, invite opinions and experiences, leave them room to be experts, too. And when readers leave a comment, reply to the comment or send them an email. As Sue Waters would say it, "Blogging is about conversations, not writing posts. Engaging with others, sharing each other's ideas and thoughts so that all gain because each individual sees a different perspective."
- building anticipation by writing a series of posts. It creates momentum and anticipation. Let your readers know you will be continuing a topic of discussion they are interested in tomorrow or some time soon.
- fostering relationship. Relationship goes beyond conversation. It takes time to build relationships but out of it comes amazing collaborations and partnerships. Create a space where your readers can meet and interact with one another and grow friendships.
- getting sensual. Use pictures, images, spaces, and colors. Add something a little mysterious, fun, a little sensual to the look of your site.
- generating mystery and intrigue. This may include the way you design your blog, the way you write and engage readers on a heart level. You may use stories, pictures, anonymity and symbols.
- involving others. Get readers active in your blog by inviting contributions, involving guest bloggers, or, perhaps, starting a project of a some sort.
- obtaining permission. Many blog readers intend to come back to blogs that they find helpful but are too busy in their life that they just forget. Get permission to remind them through email newsletters.
- creating ownership. Let readers make big decisions about your blogs and where your blog is heading.
Make your blog scannable. Most people read online by scanning the page for individual words or phrases, headings, and other visual cues. Reading from a screen is more tiring and slower than reading on papers. Hence, scanning becomes a technique that most readers use.
The Secret to Interactive Blogging - Expertise blended with Invitation. People want a mixture of expertise and a room to speak from their own experience.
Get inside your blog reader's mind. Watch someone surf your blog and see what they do or where they go. Email your regular readers and ask for feedback. Seek opinions on design, ad placement, etc., and ask for impressions about your blog. Give your readers the opportunity to feedback to you who they are and what they think of your blog, and why they come to your blog. Let them give suggestions.
Recent design trend is minimalism. Remove useless widgets or features like calendar or recent posts. Archives are out of date.
Holistic Blogging. You need to be willing to work at your blog on a variety of fronts so that your blog will grow to its fullest potential. One common hole is a severe lack of content. Bloggers spend too much time chopping and changing design of their blog or focusing on some ad placement issues and tend to overlook the content. Another common problem: some bloggers focus too much on the content that they overlook the blog promotions, networking with other bloggers or SEO.
Subscribe to numerous, diverse blogs. The more posts you read the better you get at working out what works and what doesn't work.
Actively engage in commenting on other's blog posts and your own posts.
Provide information on how people can contact you.
Author your About page.

On Content

Try to keep your posts below 400 words.

Remember to focus on the Bulls Eye. Keep your posts short and sweet. Focus most of your content on the must know, include a bit of should know and keep the could know to a minimum.
MUST KNOW is the most important information you are trying to tell your readers.
SHOULD KNOW is the additional information that is less critical.
COULD KNOW is the other information which could be of further use but is not essential.

Post frequently.

Correct punctuation and good grammar are important.

Focus on how you lay out your post. Make your posts easy to read.

Break your posts up with paragraphs. Short paragraphs are better than long ones. Make the first sentence of each paragraph draw the reader to read more.

Use headings and suitable bullet points to break up the post into manageable bit-size chunks.

Use italics sparingly, if at all.

Use standard size text fonts.

Do not embed videos, slideshares, etc. into posts without an explanation on what you have embedded, why you have embedded it and add a link to the original location of the embed.

Be ethical in your writing and the way you represent yourself.

Admitting quickly and emphatically any mistake you make.

On Credit

Spread the link. Linking to others is a key part of blogging.

Credit, credit, credit. Acknowledge "tip offs" if you get your post idea from another blogger. Link if someone else is talking about what you are talking about and you want to add them to the conversation.

Cite your fellow blogger's interesting projects and good ideas. It is best practice to use the author's name, full blog title, and an article link when citing.

Techniques to Make Your Blog Scannable

Lists. Posts with bullet point lists get linked a lot more than similar length posts written in an essay.
Formatting. Use bold, capitals, italics, underlining, and teletext to emphasize points.You may also consider changing font sizes, color, and style to draw your reader's eyes to your main points.
Be careful about using underlines. On the Web, underlines indicate hyperlinks and may confuse your readers.
Don’t use ALL CAPS. It is unprofessional and considered by many to be “shouting.”
Headings and subheadings. Large, bold words that act as visual cues of what is happening are effective ways of drawing readers further into articles.
Pictures. Research shows that readers' eyes are drawn down the pages by pictures. Place pictures cleverly by your key points especially when they closely relate to the content.
In regular writing, such as the writing you might do for your blog, images can also help communicate information. If you are writing a procedure or a step-by-step how-to, screenshots of the steps would be extremely helpful. If you are writing about a vacation spot or your own vacation, include a few photos to show the scenes you’ve written about. If your article explains the organization of a company or one of its departments, include an organizational chart to put things in perspective.
More than just communicate information, images can also add visual appeal.
A word of warning: Don’t use photos that don’t belong to you. This is likely a violation of copyright law. You can probably use company logos, if your use is consistent with the company’s rules governing logo use (normally available on its Web site) and you’re writing about the company. But taking photos off another Web site or scanning them out of a print publication for use on your site could get you in trouble. Use photos, screenshots, and drawings that you’ve taken or that you’ve received permission to use. The rule of thumb here is, if you don’t know whether you have permission to use it, you probably don’t.
Borders/blockquotes. Boxes around quotes can get the attention of readers.
Space. You don't need to fill up every inch of your screen. Create spaces to help readers not feel overwhelmed. This also tends to draw readers' eyes to what is inside such space.
Get to the point. Be succint or concise with your points.
Dont bury your points. If you have a key point, make sure you say it up front. You may expand on it later but get your message across in the first few sentences, if possible.
Find creative ways to reinforce your main point throughout your post.
Don't introduce too many "new" ideas in one post. This helps to avoid overwhelming readers with information all at once. If you want to cover many ideas that relate to one another, consider a series of posts that link to each other.
Break Up Long Paragraphs. Long paragraphs of unbroken text can intimidate readers. They look unapproachable, like a college textbook.
Break up long paragraphs at logical points. This will require some writing skill, since you can’t arbitrarily chop paragraphs up. Each one must still communicate a complete thought. But shorter paragraphs are a lot less intimidating than long ones — a point that applies to sentences, too.