Not being a magazine reader, Matt felt bad that he wasn’t able to participate in the last blog meme on reading magazines. He decided instead to start a new meme offering 3 tips for bloggers And lo and behold I get to be the first person tagged. I like Matt’s idea of making the meme helpful so without further ado here are my 3 blogging tips.
Develop your blogging voice – Your blogging voice is what will make your blog uniquely you. Your voice is in part your writing style, in part your attitude, in part your experiences, in part the topic you cover and the way you cover it, in part just about anything that makes your voice yours. If you develop it well enough someone can read a piece you write and know it’s you even if there’s no author credited.
Participate in your community – Blogging is a conversation. You can write all you want, but if no one ever reads your words it could just as well be in a notebook on your coffee table. Bloggers like to link out and are always looking for an interesting idea. Write interesting comments on other blogs both in and out of your industry. Link out to those same blogs. Take an idea someone writes about and carry the conversation over to your blog with a link to the original post. Bloggers notice who comments and notice who links to them and notice who drives traffic to them. If you’re persistent you’ll get noticed, get links, and make friends.
Publish full feeds – This one took me too long to learn. I originally published partial feeds because I wanted to limit people scraping my content. Wrong. It gets scraped anyway. Many people prefer full feeds to the point they won’t subscribe to any blog that doesn’t publish a full feed. Not everyone will use a browser to read content on your site. So what. If you link to your other posts they’ll click those links and get to your blog. They’ll click through to comment if you say something worth commenting on. Ever since I started publishing full feeds I’ve noticed my subscriptions increasing at a better rate than they had been prior.
Since no blogging meme is ever complete without tagging a few other people…
Tag you’re it.
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Isn’t RSS an amazing technology? I need to go in and check to see whether I’m publishing full feeds or not after reading this. It’s good advice! But if you think how the browser is just one type of software that lets people enjoy your site, they might prefer another.
John it looks like you’re publishing partial feeds. If you changed things since yesterday I might need to regrab the feed, but I’m still seeing partial.
RSS is great. And to think the majority still don’t know what it is or what it can do. Wait until people begin to wonder why that icon keeps turning orange in IE7. Most people will still probably read your rss content through a browser in some fashion, whether it’s on your site or through an online reader, but they don’t have to and that’s part of the beauty.
Btw, the reason I didn’t take part in the journals meme is the same as with Matt – the only thing I read is either job related or my favorite authors. No magazines or newspapers.
I posted a reply, sent a trackback, not sure if its in, though.
Cheers.
Looks like I chose poorly in the last meme. 2 out of 5 that don’t read magazines isn’t a good percentage for me.