Building a Better Blog

Here are my Top 10 ideas for how to build a better blog, now gathered in one place, and featuring a special Greatest Hits Collection Bonus Track!

1. Use Categories

If you publish all of your writing to one location, but regularly write on a wide variety of topics, do your readers a favor and utilize categories. This will allow an interested reader to quickly view all of your posts on network security, while avoiding the day-by-day emotional swings of your child's soccer season.

2. Use Titles

As much as possible, title your posts. This works best when your posts are fairly original and somewhat lengthy, but can be ignored if your blog is primarily links to other sites and posts. The benefits are two-fold. First, Google seems to place a large value on titles, especially when others link to a post. Second, your readers who follow your site using a news reader/aggregator will appreciate being able to quickly scan your titles for posts of interest.

3. Publish During High Traffic Times

If one of your desires is to generate traffic, try to publish during high traffic hours. Many people scan weblogs.com and other services (including TypePad and many TypePad member sites) for recently updated weblogs. Also, publishing during prime waking/working hours will give other writers time to comment, link, or respond to your post. A brilliant post in the middle-of-the-night will often get buried by the morning rush of fresh content.

4. Syndicate Your Entire Post

Again, in the never-ending effort to ensure happy readers, be sure to syndicate (i.e. send) your entire post through RSS. I follow over 75 weblogs (which is probably a low number on average). With the amount of time it takes to keep up with the constant stream of information, it is a great benefit to be able to read each post in its entirety without a separate trip to the browser. I know it is especially tempting for businesses to try to drive traffic to their site by forcing readers to visit the website in order to read the full article, but inevitably I end up unsubscribing from those sources instead.

5. Click Your Own Links

When you post an article that links to other post or blogs, be sure to click those links after you post. First, this simply verifies that your links work, which is always a good QA check. Second, this will cause your site to show up in the stats and referrer logs of the sites you link to. Most bloggers track their traffic and referrers religiously, so this will make sure they are aware of your post as soon as it's been published.

6. Develop an Authentic Voice

Obviously, this is the most important element of a successful weblog and a daily struggle. If you are authentic, honest, and original, you will find readers who care about what you write. And if you write about what you know and what you are passionate about, you can assure that your readers are informed and entertained. Resist the temptation to imitate your favorite weblogs while still leaving room to learn from the best.

7. Tell Us Who You Are and How to Contact You

I often find myself on an interesting blog and decide I'd like to link to it or contact the author. Other times, I might find an opinion unique or challenging, but then realize that I don't know whether the writer is an employee or user.

A surprising number of weblogs have none of this information. Often weblogs start as a way of communicating with a small number of people who know each other well. But you can be sure that soon Google will find you, and then others will land on your site and they need to be able to get the basics about you quickly. You don't want to be dismissed as a gadfly when you're actually the lead developer for a highly anticipated piece of software.

So, unless you have specific reasons for confidentiality, include your full name, position and role (if your blog is related to your professional life), and a way to contact you directly.

8. Don't Be Afraid to Promote

I've written a number of posts that I thought would be of interest to other bloggers or sites, such as Robert Scoble, MacSurfer, and Hacking Netflix. My first hope was that the writing would be so captivating that the posts would slowly rise to the top of the blogosphere and be noticed. Not a good plan!

My second hope was that by linking to these sites and clicking on those links, my site would show up in the referrer logs for those sites, which would spark curiosity and bring my post to their attention. This works fairly well, but relies on the site owners and authors religiously monitoring their traffic or subscribing to weblog search sites such as PubSub and Feedster. Better, but still inadequate.

Finally, I stumbled upon a brilliant, but underused technique: Tell them about it!. People who are active in the weblog world are active precisely because they are curious people who are always looking for new perspectives. I find that sending a short, polite email that introduces yourself, offers a thank you or general kindness regarding their site, and then brings your post to their attention, is generally very successful. I never specifically ask for a link and wouldn't recommend it. Your purpose is simply to be read by people you respect and if you achieve that, you have been successful. The choice of whether to link to your site is entirely up to them.

9. Comment on Other Sites and Your Own

All of us crave feedback. When people post comments or send you an email about something you've written, you're reassured that your effort is worthwhile and having an impact, however small, on others.

What's the best way to encourage feedback? Simple: do unto others! Commenting on other sites not only benefits other writers, but it's a great way to get your own site noticed by people who would not normally find you. It's hard to expect others to give feedback if you're not willing to do it yourself.

In a related note, when people do take the time to leave a comment or send you an email, be sure to respond promptly and thank them for dropping by. There should never be a lonely "Comments (1)" on one of your own posts.

10. The More You Write, the More You'll Have to Write About

Despite the fact that this sounds like a bad line from a fortune cookie, it's been proven time and time again. Nearly everyone who starts a blog asks themselves, "What in the world am I going to write about?" The best advice I can give is to just start writing with as little self-criticism as possible. As your mind gets used to writing, you'll start thinking of new ideas without even trying. You'll naturally begin seeing writing opportunities all over the place, in conversations, reading, driving, shopping, or even in church. Whenever I'm talking to my fellow bloggers, I find myself saying, "That's a blog post!" But before that happens, you need to start writing more and thinking about writing less.

[Bonus Track] Content Brings Google

Do not underestimate the power of Google as you raise your site's traffic. As you're content grows and your posts are linked to or commented on, search engines will bring more and more visitors. Google in particular seems to highly value weblog posts in their rankings, allowing rather small blogs to show up on the first page of search results with large, established corporate sites. I estimate that over 20% of my daily traffic is from search engine traffic. Many of these people read the related post, but then spend a short time browsing the rest of the site, which is another reason why Tell Us Who You Are and How to Contact You is so important. I also recommend placing a Where Do I Start? collection of your best, most representative writing on the front page to help people get up to speed quickly.

Comments

[rob]

Great tips. I linked to this from my eMinsitryNotes blog: http://eministrynotes.blogspot.com/2005/01/building-better-blog.html

[Brian Bailey]

As much as I wanted to leave your comment all alone just to be ironic, I wanted to thank you for visiting!

Your site has a lot of great information on it and I'll definitely be following along. It sounds like you're in a great position that allows you to use your skills for the Kingdom.

[haacked]

Great tips. I wrote a post a while back that I think is a great complement to yours.

http://haacked.com/archive/2004/10/08/1322.aspx

It's a primer on how to be a vain blogger.

[Jamfris]

I think they in general are very good points, some of them I'm doing them before reading this... but I'll keep a pair of ideas to start doing them as well...

Sure it's a good job!

[Des Paroz]

Excellent info and some good ideas. I'll let you know if they help!

[amit agarwal]

You top idea is "Use Categories" but it's really unfortunate that Blogger doesn't support categories yet.

I wrote on adding categories in blogger here http://labnol.blogspot.com/2004/10/how-to-add-categories-to-your-blog.html but it's just a bad way to get things done.

The Indian Blogger
http://labnol.blogspot.com

[Lisa Haneberg]

Thanks for this. I had not thought about the time of day thing before. I always set my posts to go at 1am PST to ensure it is there before most people rise. Perhaps I will try shifting to 4am PST and see if I notice a difference.

[Zes]

What do you mean, exactly, when you say categories? If I use the category "Apple", at first glance, will a visitor to my site know if I'm talking about fruit, a computer company, or the apple of my eye? I think there's too much ambiguity with user-defined categories for them to be considered remotely useful.

I liked your other ideas, though.

[Aristotle]

Interesting read, thanks. Some of these should be no-brainers. The proposition to mind posting times is sort of silly, it neglects the fact that the Web is international and spans all timezones… Some I could extrapolate. Some were suggestions genuinely new to me.

In courtesy towards readers, I “only” run afoul of… the most basic rules: titles and categories. The lack of categories is something that has been bugging myself as well for a while and will be thoroughly fixed by the design of the new backend I wrote about on my log.

The other rule, however, is something I have been quite conflicted about ever since I started logging my thoughts. I didn't do titles when I started and I still don't want them — at least not titles in the traditional fashion. My initial aversion toward titles stemmed from the fact that they're really a form of metadata and must not be necessary to understand a piece of writing, even though a title is beneficial for a long article where it can summarize the content, tantalize the reader, and provide an anchor in memory which it is easily remembered by. Short entries, inconclusive entries, meandering entries, single link entries, site change notification entries, however: they all defy the attempt to be titled clearly, uniquely, concisely, informatively.

I actually briefly tried titles, including restrospective titling of all my existing entries, because I wanted to permalink by title. Unfortunately, I had to back out immediately because titling had an instant and very sharp stunting effect on my logging. Titles don't easily work for me. Since I don't do incoherence, it often took far more effort to title an entry than to write it. And since I was looking for a permalink scheme, only titling selectively was not an option.

Looking at the opaque number sequence my feed presents itself as in my aggregator, though, I can well see the utility titles would provide.

I'm still unsure about what I'll do, but I think I have a working plan on how I will title my entries. Here's the trick: I won't use titles.

My “categories” are really going to be keywords or tags, so /programming/seen will bring up my commentary on thoughts about programming seen elsewhere. You'll also be able to subscribe to a feed for just that keyword combination. Flickr and del.icio.us have demonstrated the principle.

How does this tie into the titling quandary? Well, it solves it. There's no need to title entries: the title will derive from the combination of tags, so a title might be something like “seen functional programming obfuscated unlambda”. Or if you arrived at the entry by visiting /seen/programming (obviously, the order of tags in the URL doesn't matter), the title will instead be “functional obfuscated unlamda”. If you visit /seen/functional/programming/obfuscated/unlambda, well, then the entry won't have a title. But does it matter? There might be a total of two of such entries during all of the log's existence. If you picked that URL you knew what you were looking for anyway, so you don't need a title to help you find the relevant content.

That's my take on titles.

[Aristotle]

Zes: Flickr and del.icio.us prove that user-defined categories definitely are far more than remotely useful.

[Dan]

Zes: User-defined categories, when used in concert with each other, can remove much of the ambiguity. That's why tagging blog posts (and pictures and bookmarks and every other kind of data you have) with as much metadata as possible is such a good idea. Sure, 'Apple' could mean lots of things. But my post about a new Apple product might be tagged with 'Apple,' 'tech,' 'news,' 'geek,' 'eyecandy,' and so on. The more, the merrier.

Plus, many blogs concentrate on a specific genre. For instance, your blog might deal with discussions of fruit exclusively, and may be called, for example, 'Zes' Fruit Review Blog.' In this case, you could pretty reasonably assume that even a first-time visitor to your site would know an entry tagged with 'Apple' would be talking about the fruit.

[pam]

I appreciate your tips very much. All other how-to-promote tips try and dictate what kind of content a blogger should (and should never) write. That's pointless and insulting, given that there are half a gazillion bloggers out there, running the gamut of topics, and we'll talk about our kid's soccer games if we darned well want to.

[Seth]

Thanks for the information. I've added two additional ideas for building traffic that I think are key. Check them out here: http://www.mostlymuppet.com/archives/2005/01/10/building-a-better-blog/

[Winnetta]

As a brand new blogger of 2 days, I have to say that this is one of the most informative articles I have read. It speaks to the novice as much as to the expert. Thanks, Brian! I did link to this in my post today.

[lis]

nice post! I translate it into Chinese.

http://lis186.4dwebhosting.com/index.php?p=1227

[Carmen Holotescu]

Hi,

Very good points, thanks.

Please let me comment on:

1. Use Categories

If your system ( as Blogger ) doesn't allow to categorize the posts, here is my proposal: use del.icio.us - already implemented on my weblog ( http://www.weblog.ro/timsoft ).

Each category of messages is represented by a tag in my del.icio.us account.

After writing each blog, I post it to del.icio.us, using the corresponding tag ( or tags for multiple categories ).

My weblog displays the links to del.icio.us tags implementing the categories, and also the corresponding RSSs.

The visitors have the possibility of browsing the blogs using the categories and also to subscribe, if they want, only to a few categories, using the RSSs provided by del.icio.us.

It's very simple, and it's a mechanism which can be used under each weblog system without categories.

4. Syndicate Your Entire Post

An important reason to syndicate the entire post ( thus your system should build a quality RSS: the corresponding item in the RSS file to contain the entire post ) is the fact that the aggregators and search engines for weblogs ( Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogdigger, etc ) collect and search only the RSS feeds.

I would add also to periodically send pings to these systems ( if your weblog system doesn't do it automatically ) - you can use http://pingomatic.com or http://pings.ws.

Thanks,
Carmen

[Brian]

Do you have specific times of day when you suggest posting during "high traffic times"? I assume you're referring to regular weekday business hours in the US (Easter Time - Pacific Time). Is there a specific time that you see traffic peaking? In my experience, the traffic for most all website I've worked with follows a bell curve, ramping up around 8:00 AM ET, peaking around noon, and dropping off by 7 or 8 PM.

[Richard]

The best time to post is when you've throught through what you want to write, are satisfied that you've made all the edits necessary. I don't think a lot of people actually look at weblogs.com or any of the ping services anymore, because there are so many weblogs and other types of sites that ping it now. Those services are used mostly by machines such as Blogrolling.com, PubSub.com and Technorati.com and the like to determine what is fresh and to index that post so that it can display data.

Also, if most of your readers are reading via RSS feeds (the vast majority of mine are), it won't matter too much when you post, because your readers will get to it eventually. (Also: they may sort their weblogs alphabetically or according to subject criteria or according to what colour your stylesheet has as the background.) With RSS, there is no "prime time" for blogs. Prime time is whenever people load up their aggregator or whenever the content is syndicated, which is usually every hour or so, more so for the latter.

[MikeK]

Dont' be afraid to e-mail me (it's on my site) or use trackbacks to get my attention.

BTW, I did notice you. ;-)

- Mike
Mikek@HackingNetflix.com

[Amyo]

Completely agree with everything you said. I value categories so highly that I put them at the bottom of my index page so that people might be tempted to delve further in to the site and archives in the hopes that they became a regular reader.

People shouldn't forget to check their own logs as well.

May I also say that your suggestions must be working as it prompted me to comment here!

[Jeroen]

Is you see, I followed your advise ;-)

[808blogger]

Very Nice

[Mister Tut]

Wow, a really valuable article. I couldn't agree more about categories. Thank you for the resource!

-Tut
www.health-hack.com

[Robert Waugh]

Some good stuff there... BUT...

In reference to point #4, Syndicate Your Entire Post... I can support that only if you never, never, never use the "description" field to post content, not never. (Pet peeve.) Some people may use feeds to circumvent their web browsers, but other people (like me) prefer to use them to *choose* what they want to read. I like lists I can scan quickly, and I wish they weren't so rare.

Bloggers who syndicate their posts in their entirety, or use auto-generated excerpts in the description field seem very unprofessional to me when compared to other bloggers who explicitly write short, concise descriptions for each entry... one to three sentences, and more only if necessary. Such a description is more informative than a title, and more concise than an entry's first few sentences or paragraphs. These descriptive feeds *add information* rather than repeat it in a slightly different format.

Those more sophisticated bloggers will have that extra information available to them to help improve site navigation down the road. As an example, soon I'll be using the descriptions I wrote for the images on my blog for the ALT tags of those images. I didn't plan to use them this way in the beginning, but the option is there because I made it a habit to describe everything.

But most of all... okay, the last thing I thought of... a good decription is proof positive that the blogger does have some sort of point, and they know what it is.

Something like the RSS 1.0 content module which adds a field for posting content, I can support that somewhat. A system where I could choose to read descriptions for some sites, but choose to download content for my favorite sites, that would be nice. But I would still rather full content be kept seperate from the news feed. Seperate but accessible; printer-friendly pages would make an ideal candidate for that kind of document. It's stripped of navigational elements, but still has style.

So, I'm not necessarily against posting content through syndication files, but I happen to think it's more important to use them for describing content. That IS what they were created to do. That's what metadata is. In the short term, I would consider using the content:extended field for RSS 1.0 if I were more interested in promoting my site, but I will never use the description tag for anything other than it's intended purpose.

[bcblog]

Good tips, translated titles to Chinese http://blog.bcchinese.net/bcblog/archive/2005/01/13/7686.aspx