23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 1

By Arpit On Friday, February 09, 2007 At 11:02 PM

According to Technorati, there are more than 55 millions blogs registered on it. Your blog may be one of them. Now what makes the difference between handful of good blogs and remaining others?
Here are some tips to good blogging. Mind you that these tips will not convert your blog into those best one. But still it will give you a good start.

1. Forget the default template. Looks matters.
Try to customize your blog template. Don’t use one of the default templates provided by your blog host. It is always favorable to hire a professional designer for your blog template. But if you can’t afford to hire one, just take advantage of free templates available on net. Download them and give it a bit touch of yourself by adding some images, favicon, logo and colour scheme.

2. Mind the colour scheme of your blog.
Just give a second thought to the colour scheme of your blog. Keep yourself in the shoes of your readers and then decide what colour you should opt for your blog. A shining bright colours may look attractive to teenage folks, but it may irritate some grown up mature readers. Also if you are blogging about some serious topic like politics, a simple eye-friendly colour scheme is suitable.

3. Optimize your post length.
Avoid writing a long post. A standard blog post has 250-300 words. A very lengthy post always creates a chance to loose reader’s attention and hence affects the readership of your blog. If the post is long, try breaking it in parts. Instead of writing a long post titled ‘100 Adsense tips’, you can go for posts like ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 1’ and ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 2’

4. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes.
Always use spell check in your browser and have a proofreading of your post before publishing to avoid any spelling mistakes or grammatical error. Am not telling you to be hysterical about it, occasional typo or slips are ok, but a chain of errors may irritate your readers. You can use Microsoft word to type your posts, as it has a powerful inbuilt spell and grammar check.

5. Mind the fonts.
Use simple and universally available fonts in your blog post. Everyone do not have all the custom fonts installed on their computers, so if you are using some whacky custom fonts in your post, what they will see is a standard font such as Arial or Times. Also choose the size of your font according to readership of your blog. If the readers are young or lower middle aged, you can use a small font size, but for upper middle aged or grown up readers, large font size is must.

6. Provide easy navigation.
Encourage your readers to check the other posts of your blog. This will not only increase the page view count of your blog but also will lead you to get some loyal readership. Always provide links of some real good posts in the side bar. Also you can give ‘related posts’ links in the end of every post. Remember that people are lazy enough to explore a site or a blog on their own. Go up to the extent of spoon-feeding. Anyhow you have to make sure that they click other links on you blog.

7. Create a relevant Meta Data for your blog.
Always create a relevant and well describing meta data (i.e. meta description, meta keywords etc) for your blog. Create separate meta data for you blog’s main page and post pages. Meta data helps in better indexing of you blog and blogposts in search engines. Also optimize you blog’s meta keywords for relevant one.

8. Page loading time.
Try to decrease the loading time of your blog. The best way to decrease the loading time of the page is to check the widgets. Popular widgets like MyBlogLog and Flickr makes your blog look fancy, but they increase the loading time of the page. So optimize them properly. You can decrease the loading time of MyBlogLog widget by decreasing the number of visitors it shows. Also avoid embedded flash and multimedia elements in the page.

9. Post regularly.
A regular update of your blog will attract Google bots and other search engines to your blog. Google loves the pages that are regularly updated. Its simple ‘Feed the bots’. This will certainly results in good search engine ranking. Also every time your readers visit your blog, they expect to find some new content in it. Don’t disappoint them.

10. Create unique content.
The very basic rule of blogging is ‘Content is the King’. If your blog lacks good helping content, you will never get a long term readership. So try providing some original story. If there is some good news, try to be the first one or among the firsts to blog about it. Also keep your post focused on the topic. If you are blogging on a common topic, try providing atleast a point or two which appeals as new to the reader. Also if you create some real good new content, your chances of getting linked by other bloggers increase many folds. This will certainly bring a good deal of traffic to your blog and offcourse Google and Technorati juice.

Read 23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 2