Whilst Blogging I have learned a few tips in particular that I would like to share, hopefully you may find them useful. Even after all this time I am still finding new useful tips that make me think "I wish I had known that when I started out". Some of these tips may appear as just common sense but I hope to offer one or two useful ones based on my own experiences. I think the principles can be extracted for use beyond blogging and apply to web content in general.,

Follow Through

Don’t just post and forget it – follow it through. If you have taken the time to make a good quality content rich post ensure others are aware of it and how to get to it. Use tags and keywords, digg it, delicious it, stumble it, share it, find other sites that talk about similar things and build upon the discussion there and if possible refer back to what you have written. If you make a post and forget it, then no matter how good it is, you may as well write it on the back of a postcard and send it to yourself.

Avoid Conveyor Syndrome

Imagine you are sitting in front of a conveyor belt and blog posts are constantly shuffling along in front of you – each wanting to be picked up and looked at. How would you choose which post to pick up? Does something about one post in particular catch your eye?

Now, imagine you have picked something up – this post has a few short moments to capture your attention before another post on that conveyor catches your eye. What would make you stop and look more at this post and what would drive you to avoid picking up posts like this in future? Does the post do what it said it would do? Is it interesting and original?

When making a post think of that conveyor and ask yourself – what would make someone pick up this post?

Eight Out of Ten Statistics Don’t Tell You Anything

It cannot be said enough times – concentrate your energy on the content. The trouble with getting caught up with statistics is that you end up spending valuable time desperately climbing various rankings only to see that hard work disappear over time as the reward is often just temporary. It is quite easy building referring links if that is what you are setting out to do and these referring links are often used by services such as Technorati in assessing and building up your rank. However, many of these services re-evaluate these links regularly and ignore links older than a certain period of time so you would have to keep these links coming to maintain any sort of rank. This is an exhausting exercise where your time would have been better spent building good content that people will naturally want to regularly refer to.

Look for the Second Click

If a reader has taken the time to visit your site to read a post, an article or for some other reason you have one brief chance to convince the reader to return again or to delve deeper into your site. Make it simple, obvious and clear what the site is all about, what else is on offer and how to get to it. Free downloads, white papers, related content, and a site search facility are ideas for providing the second click opportunity. You could also use incentives such as competitions, draws, etc but use these with caution – ask yourself if it is better to have a smaller regular reader base who are interested in your content than a larger reader base built up of readers who want to win prizes. That said, if done appropriately it can reap benefits – who doesn’t like the thrill of winning prizes? I do and in the past have signed up to various blogs in the hope of winning something.

Sleep on it

Often, a post that seemed a great idea one day may not have the same impact on another day but once a post is published and cached, cited and linked back on other sites it can be difficult making changes. When writing a post it can be tempting to immediately publish it, but unless it is time sensitive then I would recommend scheduling it for publishing a day or two later. This gives you the opportunity to reflect on the post and a window to identify any errors or omissions that were not immediately obvious on the day the post was originally written. Often I may come back to a scheduled post and change the arrangement or rewrite paragraphs that don’t read quite right.

Comment, Comment, Comment

A golden rule amongst blogger’s I have interacted with, and one that is easily forgotten about when building a blog, is to actively take part in other blogs, social networks and discussion forums. This can be simply achieved by adding comments, later on you might want to approach a blog about submitting a guest article – many blogger’s are always keen to add guest posts.

Adding comments to other blogs has many advantages including

• Obtaining ideas for further blog posts
• Often providing a link back to your own related content where you have something more to add that can’t be fulfilled in a short comment
• Clarifying understanding of areas you plan to write about or have written about
• Building a social network with like minded people
• Signing up to comment services, such as cocomment, allows you to keep track of all your comments and effectively becomes an interesting mini-blog that can add value to your own blog

Backup your blog

At some point, and this is probably inevitable, something bad will happen and you may lose huge swathes of posts. This could be something to do with your hosting provider, the platform, database corruption, or something nastier. Losing posts in this way can be extremely disheartening and months, perhaps years, of hard graft can disappear in a blink of an eye. Rebuilding posts manually from cached snapshots held on search engines can take a very long time.

Many blog platforms have automated backup facilities available – use it. Not only that but learn how to restore this data to ensure your downtime is kept to a minimum. At regular intervals I not only backup up my feed, use a backup plug-in (that emails backups to a predefined email address) but I also copy the entire web folder structure to a memory stick and use the backup facility that my hosting provider offers.

Summary

There are still many other lessons to learn and tips to get hold of but these are the ones that I have found particularly useful – and I do believe they apply to the web in general as well as blogging.

If you are interested in more blogging tips try this other post: Blogging tips which includes a reference list of further useful blogging tips. If you have a useful tip then please share it with everyone else in the comments below.