Rating Business 2.0 on Their 7 Habits of Effective Blogging Article

I am always skeptical when magazines come out with these “how to be successful” pieces in new emerging areas as I find it hard to believe the authors have any real experience on the topics.

I suppose Business 2.0 knows a thing or two about blogging as they run their own B2Day, the Business 2.0 Blog and it is good enough for me to have them on my RSS reader to follow everyday.

Erick Schonfeld seems to handle the blogging for B2Day and he writes some fun posts such as Here’s 20 Startup Ideas and $100 Million. What Are You Waiting For?

So what does Sahelis, S.R Datta’s of Business 2.0 feel are the top 7 habits of highly effective blogging and how does ShandyKing rate these?

1. Focus intently on a narrow niche, ideally one whose audience has a predilection for high-margin products. That will appeal to advertisers.
   

   Sure, or you just have fun and write about whatever’s on your mind. Creating content solely to appeal to advertisers was so Web 1.0.

2. Set up your blog so that each post gets its own permanent URL, or permalink, and its heading becomes part of its permalink and page title. Write descriptive, keyword-heavy headings, and be sure the homepage and all archives have links on every page.
   

   This is a wise thing to do and thankfully blogging software such as Wordpress has this as a standard feature. In addition Wordpress has a Post slug feature that allows you to customize your URL strings from the actual post title. This is handy if you’re really keyword sensitive.

3. Think of your blog as database , not a newspaper-like collection of dispatches. Your archived posts should be easy to find through Google and Technorati, so cite authors and publications by name, and use tags, categories and keywords consistently.
   

   I agree 100%. Always cite your sources. There is nothing more annoying then reading a great post on someone’s blog and they don’t cite their sources. This is English 101. Citing your source only takes a second and adds creditability to your ideas.

4. Blog frequently and regularly -if possible, at least half a dozen posts every weekday before lunchtime, when many readers take a break from work and check out the blogosphere.
   

   This actually does matter if you’re a traffic junkie. For those that live on the west coast of the United States , write your posts in the late evening the night before so the folks on the east coast can read them first thing in the morning. If you live in Australia , I am not sure what you have to worry about.

5. Use striking images in your posts. They liven up the page and attract readers, and if you use captions, you’ll gain additional traffic by making it easy for Google Image Search and other visual search engines to index your illustrations.
   

   Be careful here! Your readers do pull traffic from your servers and each one of those pictures can cost you money. If you’re going to show pictures, perhaps you should think about keeping the image source on someone else’s server. Just make sure it’s on a server that has little downtime otherwise your pages wont load correctly.

6. Enable comments and interact with readers; cultivate your audience-that’s what advertisers will be paying your for.
   

   Comments are great but there are plenty of spammers. I have my comment settings to allow anyone to post but their first post his held in moderation. Once I approve someone the first time they will then have permission for future posts to go live as soon as they make their comments.

   To protect myself from Spam I am using Akismet . But I have recently spoken to someone who can even bypass this.

7. Make friends with other bloggers, online and off. Link to their posts and they’ll return the favor. Other blogs may well send you most of your traffic.
   

   For the first few months the majority of traffic on this blog originated from other blog referrals. Now the majority of my traffic comes from Netscape, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

   When starting out it can be difficult to get people to link to your new blog so do your best to create fresh unique content and once you have enough content for other to get a feel for your writing it should not be that hard to get links.

   There is this unwritten rule about not asking people to link to your blog. I think this is a lame rule, especially when starting out. As reported in Blogging for Dollars, Business 2.0 there are 50 million blog’s with 2 new ones being added each second. I see nothing wrong with asking those that you know to link to you to help you stand out a bit. Then again, if you find your not generating links organically over time this could be a good sign
   your blog sucks.

I’ve got to add just one more to this list:

Spelling Spelling Spelling – I am probably the world’s most awful speller. Trust me when I say I literally see certain words backwards and when writing sentences such as this one, my mind has already completed the sentence while my fingers are working on the first word.

Still, readers hate to read poorly writen articles. I write all my posts in Microsoft Word and by the time I am done the sheet looks like it has the chicken pox. I take a break from my writing and come back to correct all my mistakes.

Unfortunately Microsoft Word does not know how to correct all my grammatical mistakes as I often mix up my meanings.

I do think if people are going to take the time to write a post for the public to read they should take a few extra minutes to clean up the grammar. If your not going to correct it when you’re a public writer, when will you?

This entry was posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 11:25 am and is filed under News, SEO / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.