A friend in conversation remarked in amazement recently about how much I post and read online and while I had never really thought of it as anything but normal, I thought (naturally) that there might be a post in it about the way I operate and post. So in no particular order my tips for successful blogging.

1/ Post often. Its not unusual to find blogs that you can never tell whether they have been abandoned. Some of the best and most rewarding relationships are with regular readers who find themselves getting involved in your life. If there is only a post every few months then your unlikely to develop those regular readers

2/ Write for yourself, not for an audience. I’ve always written for myself for the enjoyment of it all. If you start trying to write for who you think your audience is then your not true to yourself and the enjoyment will sooner or later fade.

3/ Keep in mind No 2 but there is no reason why you can’t write in a manner thats going to entertain and humour can be a valuable tool to entertain. My advice is to avoid “blue humour” as its too easy to offend.

4/ Always allow comments. Your going to interact better with people in a two way manner than if they visit your site and its all passive. If someone takes the time to comment then where its appropriate reply even if its little more than “thanks”. I like to apply the same rules as it would be if it was a face to face conversation.

5/ Keep your antispam technique up to date. I use wordpress with plugins and that does the job. Depending on your blogging platform your options may be more limited but even with free platforms such as Blogger there are steps you can take to reduce it.

6/ If you decide to have advertising on your site, then try to make it part of your site rather than dominating the site. We would all love to make good money from blogging but its not going to happen for most of us and there are sites that will give you far better advice than I’m able on making money from blogging. You can always on first visit tell the blogs whose authors have read an article on making money from blogging and given it a try and the site is a mishmash of advertisments with minimal actual content. Try to keep the advertisments relevant to your site. For example if you write a photography blog, use ads relevant to photography

7/ Sequential Activity. If you can, try to write and read while doing other things. It can take a lot of time out of your day by the time that you write and read what you want to for the day. Even if its just watching tv like I am then you are getting the best of both worlds.

8/ Be a responsible blogger. If you quote someone else’s work then link to them, don’t just steal the content outright. They have worked hard to generate the work and theft is at the end of the day theft.

9/ Generating more traffic. There are many ways to generate more traffic to your blog which can include blog traffic exchanges, directory sites and even visiting other blogs. If you visit other blogs, leave a comment on a post and you may find you receive return traffic from that blog and even generate an ongoing online friend.

10/ As much as we try not to, once in a while a post will in hindsight turn out to be a bomb or a stinker. It might be because of an off day or the alignment of the planets or any other reason. My advice is to move on and not dwell on it otherwise you start to worry about future posts which makes good posts harder and the downward spiral begins.

11/ Try to use sentence structure and correct spelling. I always remember visiting a random journal in which each entry was around a page long and was as far as i could tell one long sentence with many of the words written phonetically (how they sound like, done becomes dun for example). I tried reading an entry but it just got too hard very quickly.

12/ Don’t be afraid to try something new - it might be a hit, it might be a miss but what ever it will be something different. Added 27 Jan 06

13/ But most of all, enjoy blogging. If you don’t then its time to move on.