The Sentient Search Engine

So I’ve been blogging for over a year now, and I’ve been reading blogs for even longer than that, so I thought I would share some of my knowledge (such as it is) with the rest of you. Here are 10 potentially helpful tips.

1. Make sure your blog is “about” something and that you are aware of what that is. All too often I see blogs that are so all over the place that one gets tired of reading them. Unless the quality of your writing is sufficient to stand on its own merits, you need to be consistent to keep the attention of your readers.
2. The topic of your blog should be as specific as you can maintain. You don’t want the topic to be so specific that you can’t write about it on a regular basis. However you don’t want the topic to be so general that the blog has no focus (see #1). If you find you’re having difficulty keeping up your blog, try increasing its scope, especially if you’re new to blogging. I used to have two blogs, WebraryLinks and CoolQueries. The first was a collection of web site reviews and the second was a listing of interesting reference questions I answered at work. Separately these blogs were hard to keep up at a reasonable level, so I merged them and added gaming and general library stuff to the mix and lo and behold it became easier to keep up.
3. Make sure you’re actually interested in the topic you’re writing about. You be surprised how often this is not the case. I started WebraryLinks in a fit of Web 2.0 enthusiasm, but ultimately found that I wasn’t that interested in writing reviews for websites all the time.
4. Keep the blog page clean. As cool as some of those JavaScript widgets are, too many of them can turn your blog into a cluttered mess. When you’re considering adding a widget to your blog, ask yourself if you’re including it because it adds useful functionality, or because you think its cool. If it’s the latter, perhaps its best you did without.
5. Start a post as soon as you can after you get the idea for it. You don’t need to finish, just start it. Take advantage of the capability to save as drafts. Doing do will keep good posts from slipping through your fingers.
6. Tagging is important. Make sure you do a good job tagging/labeling/categorizing your posts. This will help folks find stuff on blog. When you can reuse tags/labels/categories in your blog. This will allow your readers to find all the posts related to a topic easily.
7. A picture is worth a thousand words, so use images and video (embedded or otherwise) to add interest to your blog when appropriate. This is especially true when a graphical presentation explains your thoughts better than words alone.
8. Use consistent formatting. This should be a no-brainer, but so many blogs I read are terribly inconsistent in this regard. Your format should be a way readers can tell what blog their reading. Think long and hard before making changes to be sure that the change is necessary.
9. Be cognizant of how your blog appears in various browsers. It’s probably a good idea to have at least Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 on your system so you can load your blog in both and make sure that it looks right in both. If you’re feeling very ambitious you can add others like Opera or Safari.
10. Make sure you’re having fun. If a blog is work for you, stop. Anyone who reads it can tell and you’re just wasting your time.