Blogging Best Practices

We are in Week 3 of the Practical Internet Marketing Certificate Program and the topics discussed this week are Blogs, Wikis and RSS. Creating a blog has become something that now requires less technical expertise. More and more people are blogging so you need to ensure that your blog has certain qualities that distinguish it from the competition.

A good start is to investigate what are considered best practice. Here are three links to start you off:

Dave Taylor’s Blogging Best Practices
Dave has some sensible suggestions suitable for most blogs

Kari White’s 7 Best Practices for Corporate Blogging
Kari has some excellent advice for the corporate world that wants to engage with the blogosphere.

Joshua Fruchter’s Best Practices for Legal Blogging
Blawgs = Law Blogs.

Lastly David L. Sifry (founder and CEO of Technorati) has osme excellent advice that was published in Wired magazine:

1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.

2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.

3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.

4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”

5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?