Blogging Tips Based on Six Months at Technology Evangelist
We launched the Technology Evangelist blog six months ago this past Friday, and have learned a lot about blogging over the past 180+ days. Here are ten things we learned and/or wish we knew before we started:
- Setting a Schedule is Critical: It would be easy to let a day or two slip by between posts, but once visitors start checking back on a daily basis we want to keep fresh content coming for our regular readers. We decided to publish once a day and work hard to stick to that schedule. In the past month, we've added an occasional second post a day of interesting links using a del.icio.us daily digest, so we're averaging a bit over a post a day at this point.
- Burn that feed: If you can't measure it, did it happen? We burned our site feed, comments feed, and feeds for our video and audio feeds through Feedburner so we can track each feed's circulation. It's easier to do this if you do it right away.
- Search Engine Optimizing Blogging Platform: Today's popular blogging applications are fairly search engine friendly, but making a few adjustments to the way pages are served can lead to higher rankings for your blog's content. Some changes we've made include adjusting the serving of post title tags, changing the choice of tags used for some HTML markup, and hyperlinking post titles to individual posts.
- Create an Syndication Options Page: Most people don't necessarily understand what the RSS icon is doing on so many sites. However, they understand concepts like "Add to My Yahoo!" so using chicklets can help build circulation. However, publishing the chicklets on site templates can become a maintenance nightmare. We chose to create a RSS Feeds Page where we provide information on how to subscribe to each of our site's feeds via most common feed readers.
- Create About Pages: We like to learn something about the authors of blogs we read, and figured our readers would like to do the same, so we created an About Us page, and bios for each our our site's authors.
- Add Photos to Posts: Photos help personalize the site, and helps regular readers quickly determine who they're reading on any given day.
- Add Bookmarking Options: Just this past weekend, we had our first trip to the homepage of Digg. In fact, Ben's post, "Ubuntu Linux, Dapper Drake Flight 7 - How Linux is getting very close to mass adoption" went all the way to #1 on Digg.com. Providing a "Digg This" link at the bottom of the post makes it easy for people to share content they like. Reddit and del.icio.us have also delivered significant traffic to posts that have caught on with those two audiences.
- Add Comments Notifier: We love it when people leave comments, but what's really great is when we're able to enable a conversation between readers on topics that interest all of us. Notifier automatically sends an email to commenters letting them know someone has responded to their post, making it easy for visitors to keep up to date on what people are saying. Also, we publish a comments RSS feed where visitors can receive the latest comments from our site in their favorite feed reader.
- Add Recent Comments List: We generally focus on writing posts that have a life longer than a day or two, so they tend to draw comments not only on the they they're posted, but for months after the post is published. Publishing a recent comments list helps visitors find
- Stay on Top of Spam: I can't stress this one enough. Spam is the graffiti of blogs. Bloggers who don't prevent or quickly clean up spam on their sites are in effect contributing to the blog spam problem. In fact, you can #'s 8 or 9 without addressing comment spam first. We've experimented with various options on how to make this work for our visitors
- Bonus: Claim Your Blog on Technorati: Technorati is a great site for tracking what's going on in the blogosphere, but for bloggers, it's the measuring stick for relevancy of your blog. Technology Evangelist, like all blogs, started at dead last out of the ~32 million blogs tracked by Technorati when the site went live six months ago. By December 1st, we broke into the top 1,000,000. By the end of 2005, we had moved up to ~100,000. Top 35,000 at the middle of Jan. Top 20,000 at the start of Feb. Top 7,500 at the end of March. We broke 6,000 near the end of April, moved to the top-5000 last week, and currently hold 4,379th place out of 40.6 million blogs, putting us within striking distance of the top one hundredth of 1% of blogs tracked by Technorati. Since our blog's link acquisition rate has increased over the past six months, we should continue to climb in the rankings. How high will Technology Evangelist go? Only time will tell. Don't hesitate to link to us if you want to throw a little link love our way.
While we've learned a few tricks to making sure we rank as high as we can on Technorati, the real key to high rankings is receiving unsolicited links from other blogs based on the quality of your site's content. While we'll miss watching our rankings jump tens of thousands of places overnight, it's great to see our site rewarded in such a measurable way by this 3rd party measure. Once you claim your blog, you'll likely become addicted to your Technorati ranking too.
What do you wish you knew before you started blogging? Are there any tricks, tools or tactics that you find invaluable? Let's help bloggers focus on creating valuable content rather than messing around with technical issues like those outlined above.
