Blogging Resources: October 2008 Archives

I've often been told that I'm a good writer.  Personally, I think I'm probably slightly above average, but I'm no Hemingway.  I found a great resource on improving your writing over at Copyblogger.  Their "Copywriting 101" series provides a series of articles, each of which can be read in a few minutes, that should help you write better than you do now.  If you're serious about blogging, I recommend checking it out.

We're probably all guilty of some grammar errors in our writing.  For example, I prefer putting my punctuation marks outside of quotation marks unless they're part of the actual quote.  I prefer "to boldly go" over "to go boldly" in the Star Trek theme.  But as lax as my own writing may be with some rules, there are a few that really irritate me when I see them in print.  If I start reading a blog and bump into more than a couple, I'm out of there.

The folks over at Copyblogger have compiled their "Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb" and it's a great start.  If you make more than two of those mistakes in a paragraph, I'm going to have a hard time reading the rest of that paragraph. I'll tune out, and move on. So will many other readers.

Below are a few of my own "grammar nazi" rules to add to theirs:

• No text-message abbreviations in your blog entries unless you're quoting a texting conversation.  Don't use "ur" instead of "your", "2" instead of "to", "4" instead of "for", "rly" instead of "really", or a "z" where there should be an "s".  It works for text messages because the idea is to keep them short. These conventions have no business in your blog unless your audience consists only of heavy text messagers.
  
  
• No "leet speak".  That is, no "kewl", "dudez", and "miScaPitAliZed" words.  Those are cool the first time you see them, maybe.  After that, they're annoying.
  
  
• Know the difference between "loose" and "lose".  If you don't win a game, you "lose", not "loose".  If you haven't tightened up a screw, it's "loose".
  
  
• Know the difference between "then" and "than".  For example, it's "I like this more THAN that" not "I like this more then that".  It's not "this is more important then anything" but "this is more important than anything".
  
  
• "Could of", "would of", and "should of" are wrong.  It sounds like those are the words someone is saying when they are speaking, "could've", "would've", or "should've".  But those contractions are not good English, either.  Instead, use "could have", "would have" and "should have".
  
  

When I see these mistakes in a blog entry, I have a hard time taking anything else the writer says seriously, and subconsciously estimate their IQ to be just above a turnip...

Chances are that for whatever subject you blog about, there's a magazine on newsstands.  In fact, if it's something you care a lot about, you probably subscribe to related magazines, mailing lists, etc.  Why not use those publications to help you find a topic for blogging?

Pick up the magazine and flip through it.  If an ad or article catches your eye, stop and examine it in more detail.  If it's an article, analyze what you've just read with an eye toward your blog.  Did the author miss some key points that you can expand on?  Is the article too superficial, and can you give a "meatier" treatment in your blog?  Would people like a list of useful resources on that subject (a list you could research and post on your blog)?

Following are some articles I've accumulated on web design, usability, and web page layout.

10 Ways to Increase Blog Usability
This Performancing.com article talks about how to use your site's design to improve the usability of your blog.

BlogStyles
This site offers web designs for blogs. They seem to focus mostly on Movable Type and Blogger.

How to Obtain an ISSN for your Blog
An ISSN registers your blog as an official periodical, one that can appear in libraries and directories. This can boost your readership, legitimacy, and give your blog a boost.

Professional Grade Blog Design is Easy
This article talks about "branding" and designing your site.

Weblog Usability: Top Ten Design Mistakes
The top ten things you need to do in your blog to make it usable, popular, and well designed.

Webmonkey: The Web Developer's Resource
This site provides great articles about HTML, web design, cascading style sheets, and about anything else you'd want to know about web design and programming.

If you're not familiar with the topic of "search engine optimization" you may want to give the following articles a read.  It can help readers find your blog more easily in search results.

Even Blogs Need Keyword Research
Discusses what keywords can do to help improve blog usability and search engine ranking.

HighRankings.com SEO FAQ
Some frequently asked questions about search engine optimization and their answers.

How to Boost Your Rankings By Over 350 Positions
This SEOElite article discusses how adding a properly worded TITLE tag, combining keywords, adding H1 and H2 header tags, bolding, italicizing, underlining, ALT image tags, and more can boost your search engine position.

Search Engine Watch
This site is dedicated to the latest news, information, and tips about search engines and search engine optimization.

SEO Chat
This site provides news and information about search engine optimization and related topics.

If you're looking for a way to get your words to the web, you'll do well to consider a content management system.  These allow you to focus on the words, and let software handle the formatting, comments, trackbacks, and so forth.  Below are several popular content management systems for blogging:

Blogger by Google
This is Google's free content management system for blogs.

BlogWare
Blogware is described as Blog Builder Software for Blogs and Blogging.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a journaling system suitable for blogging, networking with friends, and more.

Mambo Open Source
This open source content management system is provided by a number of Internet Service Providers and hosting services.  This system is available free of charge, but you need some kind of hosting provider like godaddy.com to house the database and programs.

Movable Type
The Movable Type publishing platform is another very popular blogging content management system.  As with Mambo, there is an open source (free) version of Movable Type that you can use on an existing host to run your blog. (I'm using it for this site.)

MySpace.com
One of the many blog hosts out there.

TypePad
A powerful, hosted weblogging service.

WordPress
Free blog tool and weblog platform - one of the more-popular ones.

Blog: CMS
This open source content management system bills itself as "the most complete, feature-packed, personal publishing system on the market. It includes state-of-the-art weblog, forum, wiki engine, news aggregator (atom / rss), and photo gallery".

Wikipedia's List of Content Management Systems
This is a rather comprehensive list of free and commercial content management systems.

There are many good content management tools out there. The key, I've found, is to try writing several posts in the ones that look "good" to you and evaluate them along several lines:

• Does the tool make it easy to link to other posts?
• Is it easy to upload images and include them in your posts?
• Can you easily format the text the way you want it, with indentation, alignment, bulleted lists, etc.?
• Does it handle trackbacks, so you can see who's talking about your blog?
• Does it offer an RSS feed, to make it easy for people to scan your blog on a regular basis to find articles of interest?
• Are you able to categorize your posts (if you want to) or tag them to help readers find posts on a similar subject matter?
• Can you customize the appearance of the blog to suit you?
• If you want readers to be able to comment on your posts, is that option available?
• Can the system provide Google Sitemaps to help get your posts indexed?
• Can it handle scheduled posts (if you want to be able to write your articles in advance and have them appear on a pre-determined day)?
  

These and other questions are best answered by installing or signing up for a service you're looking at and spending time with it.

An article over at Copyblogger.com covers "10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work" for blogging.  Here are the top 5.  See their article for the rest.

1. "Who Else Wants..."  as in "Who Else Wants a High Paying Job?" or "Who Else Wants to Know How to Buy an HDTV?"
   
   
2. "The Secret of..." as in "The Secret of a Truly Great Podcast"
   
   
3. "Here is a Method that is helping [blank] to [blank]" as in "Here is a method that is helping home owners to save hundreds of dollars"
   
   
4. "Little Known Ways To..." as in "Little Known Ways to Reduce Your Car Insurance Premiums"
   
   
5. "Get Rid of [blank] Once and For All" as in "Get rid of coffee stains once and for all"
   

They claim articles with titles like these will generate hits and traffic.  I can't say that I've tried any of these particular headlines, but I'm curious to give it a shot.

The folks over at Problogger.net have posted an article detailing three simple ways to increase your blog traffic.  The reader's digest version appears below, but you should have a look at the full article to get helpful details.

1. Use Technorati tags to tag your post and its key words.
2. Leverage your other web sites to drive traffic to your blog by linking to relevant posts.
3. Make use of trackback links to popular web sites.
   

I'm going to add some others to the above list because they've worked for me personally on my other blogs and sites:

1. When you read popular web sites like Slashdot, like most bloggers do, if you have blog entries that contribute to the topic under discussion, post a reply to the article and link to your blog post.  This will prompt some readers from the "high traffic" site to come check out yours.
2. Leverage Wikipedia by linking to relevant articles on your blog.  A while back, I wrote a web-based program to emulate an old-style cipher where "A=Z, B=Y, C=X,..."  There was an article on Wikipedia that discussed this cipher, so I posted a link there going back to my blog.  I echoed a list of my 10 most-recently-published articles underneath the form on that page.  I got quite a lot of traffic from there. If you have examples or authoritative articles that might be of interest to Wikipedia readers, add a link from there to your site.
3. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques or tools.  Personally, I found the "Internet Business Promoter" or "IBP" software very helpful for this.  (They offer a free trial, and no, I don't get any kickbacks for recommending it.) It looks at your web page and that of your "competitors" (if you have any) and suggests how you can improve your search engine ranking. Implementing some very simple suggestions it offers can improve your ranking in search results, and thus your traffic.  I
   
4. Offer an RSS feed.  Joomla, Mambo, and Movable Type (all systems I've used) can provide one or more RSS feeds from your content (other major blog packages do as well). The nice thing about RSS feeds is that they allow people to aggregate (bring together) the headlines of recent posts from lots of blogs onto a single page.  For example, my Google homepage brings me RSS feeds from my favorite blogs and shopping sites.  Each day, I can read those at a glance and see if any of the sites offer something of interest to me that day.  If so, I'll normally click through and read the article.
5. Participate in forums.  If there are forums out that which discuss an area of your expertise, join them and participate in the discussions. If you're asked a particularly interesting question or are solicited for advice, provide the information being sought and offer more of the same on your blog.
6. Reciprocal linking can help, if used carefully.  If you write a blog on a topic similar to that of a friend (or another blogger who happens to be friendly to you), you might want to share links.  A link on your site could drive traffic to theirs, and vice versa.  It's a simple thing to do for both of you, and you could both benefit.  However, if you Google the term "reciprocal linking" you'll find a lot bad advice that suggests any link into your site from anywhere is a good thing. That's not the case.  For example, if your site's about horses, having reciprocal links from other horse-related sites is good.  Having reciprocal links from sites about television shows (not about horses) or cooking sites may harm more than it helps.  (Google tracks the links going into your site and has techniques for weighting their importance and worth.)  Note that tips 1, 2, and 5 above are approximately the same thing, except that you're in more control of those links.
   

Have any tips of your own to share?  Post them in the comments or write about them on your own blog and link to it here!

Most blogs have a space set aside for writing an "about me" kind of page describing the blogger writing that site.  Problogger.com has posted an article providing some very solid advice for what your "about me" page should say.  To paraphrase it quickly, they suggest describing your areas of expertise, how you and your blog can help readers, and how they can contact you.

Google (and probably other search engines) measure the relevancy and popularity of a given web page (including blogs) by the number of other sites that link to that site and page.  If you want to see your site move up in the search engine rankings, getting more links that point to your page will help.  So how do you go about that?  The folks at Performancing.com have some ideas.

The folks over at Performancing.com have published an article on how you can turn your blog into a business.  If you'd like to make your blog not only fun, but profitable, you might want to check out what they have to say.  Here's one of their suggestions:

4. Educate yourself about this business
A business is a business is a business. A lot of strategies in real world business can be applied online, but there are also specifics.

For instance, learning how to convert more prospects to customers through education and email autoresponder, placing ads strategically to increase value and result for the advertisers, and so on. Certainly you want the ads to be effective for them to keep running the ads.

For the rest, see their site.