This is a must-read for all you future and current bloggers! In the blog I’d Rather Be Writing, Tom Johnson gives the top 20 usability tips for your blog.
Here’s the short list:
1. Pick a topic for your blog. Makes sense! You want visitors to know right away what they should expect when they start reading your blog. If one day it’s a personal commentary, then the next day it’s a how-to video blog it can get a little confusing. Keep it clear, and keep readers.
2. Encourage comments. This is how you show that you care. If you’re willing to listen to other’s opinion about your blog posts, then you’re open and honest. Keep it closed, and it seems like you just want a monologue – not a conversation. Don’t worry about negative comments – you can handle them. If you have issues with SPAM (like we all do) on your blog, use Akismet or math plugin to screen them.
3. Make it easy to subscribe. Feedburner - it’s a life saver.
4. About Page. For those that haven’t been following you all along, they’ll want to know about you, your interests, why you blog.
5. Be visual. Feel free to use graphs, charts, photos, videos and more – this visual simulation will help your visitors be more engaged.
6. Keep it short. People like to read online, but they like to read in short paragraphs, bullet points, and lists. Use them.
7. Subheadings for longer posts. Help break-up long posts into bite-sized, readable chunks.
8. Link. Use pingbacks (which allows your post to show-up on another blog), link to articles within your blog. Links help your readers to go deeper into the content and to explain a point without having to explain each time. Links are great for search engine optimization, too.
9. Headlines are descriptive. Let your readers know exactly why they should read your post up-front. If you’re vague then they’ll vaguely remember to read your blog. This is really important when people subscribe through RSS: some RSS readers will only show the title of the post, so if your title is descriptive, they can decide quickly whither or not to keep reading.
10. Archive by topic. It’s important to use Categories in your blog. It helps organize the blog for readers so that if they want to read more about a subject, they can easily click the coordinating category and read all your posts related to that topic. Date archives don’t help the reader.
To read the other 10, click HERE.
My favorite, though, is the last one:
20. Blog often. Technorati has a graph that shows that the most popular bloggers blog twice a day, the least popular posts a dozen times a month. If your readers like you, they want more from you – everyday! As a small business owner, I know it’s hard to blog on a regular basis – but knowing that if you blog often, your can get more readers – which translates into more business – perhaps you’ll change you’re mind! I know I did!
Tags: blog, David Sifry, I'd rather be writing, technorati, top 20 tips
