Scoble’s Link Blog

http://blogthenticity.com/2005/03/29/blog-building-for-smarties/

Weblog: BLOGthenticity
Source: Blog Building for Smarties
Link: http://blogthenticity.com/2005/03/29/blog-building-for-smarties/

Let the dummies create a blog according to “Blog Building for Numbskulls” or “Complete Moron’s Guide to Bloggery”-us smart folk, we have our own way of doing things.

Here are the basics of building a blog.

NOTE: My experience is within the Blogger software environment. However most of these fundamentals will apply to other free or paid blog hosting and creation software. Those colleagues who see where my statements diverge from other applications are encouraged to post comments to clarify such aspects. Thanks in advance.

(1.) Pick a topic.

Seems obvious, but smart bloggers never assume anything. Whether you have a business, professional, corporate, hobby, club, special event, journalistic, academic, scientific, or personal blog, you need to have some focus, goal, or reason for existence.

Often the purpose is stated in a blog tagline or description box under the title. (See above tagline of BLOGthenticity: “real business blogs by real business bloggers”).

Business blog: Is your topic merely how wonderful your products and services are?

Why not focus on a specific area of expertise?

For example, I have a web usability analysis and online marketing company. In my web usability analysis blog (”Vaspers the Grate“), and in my official “Mentally Correct Marketing” corporate blog (”Streight Site Systems“), I almost never mention my company or its projects.

I simply post articles related to web design, ecommerce, online marketing, advertising strategy, web credibility, user observation testing, usability test forms, sales psychology, email composition tips, and other aspects of web usability, blogology, and digital marketing.

CEO blog: Please don’t tell me you’re going to blog about how great your corporation is and all the wonderful philanthropic charity work its employees perform.

Why not ask questions of your readers? Why not state certain areas in which your corporation seeks to improve, and ask for customer input? Why not state what got you started in this field of manufacturing, tell anecdotes about the early days, even mention mistakes and how you corrected them?

Ooze transparency, honesty, and sincere humility…and your readers will be fascinated.

Come down out of your ivory or Eiffel tower-and start a candid, entertaining, informative conversation with the people who put gourmet food on your fancy table: your customers.

(2.) Create a title and URL.

Choose a title and URL for your blog with great care and wisdom.

Some blogologists say you should name your blog after your industry or expertise.

For example: “Search Engine Genius” might be a decent hypothetical title for a search engine optimization consultant blog.

Another approach is to have a bizarre name that can become memorable.

For example: “Boing Boing” (tagline: “A Directory of Wonderful Things”) is a blog about tech gadgets, blogging, social aspects of the web, and other technical or tech culture topics.

I call my web usability blog “Vaspers the Grate” because I’m trying to form an imaginary identity that will someday become identical with “web usability and blogology expertise”. I can dream, can’t I? But see, I sign every email, blog comment, online article: “Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate”, so much so, that some call me Vaspers and some call me Steven. My diabolical plot seems to be working.

Please don’t title your blog “My Life”, “Random Musings of a Nobody”, or “A Blog About My [whatever] Business”. These trite, seemingly jaded, jejune, or tongue-in-cheek titles have already been used ad nauseum.

Now about your URL. I suggest it be the same as your blog title, or a truncated version of it. If your blog title is “Truly Exotic Flower Kingdom”, maybe your URL could be (if a Blogger blog):

http [semicolon] www [dot] trulyexotic [dot] blogspot [dot] com

(I didn’t put the punctuation in the hypothetical URL, to avoid triggering a trip to an actual site that might have this URL. One can never be certain an address is truly imaginary.)

If someone already is using the blog title or URL you wish to use, the blogging host will tell you to select another wording. I’ve started lots of blogs, for myself or clients, and I’ve never yet had to select another wording. Just lucky, I guess.

(3.) Find a host.

Please see the excellant article “Choosing a Blog Host” by Timothy Lee, here at BLOGthenticity.

(4.) Choose a template.

Blog hosts often will offer free or paid templates. There are also many providers of custom or pre-fab blog designs.

Templates are pre-designed layouts that provide the design, the visual structure for your blog, and determine how and where you can position various functionalities and widgets.

One advantage of free Blogger hosting is that you can switch from one template to another until you’re satisfied. But you may lose certain HTML additions, like blogrolls, reciprocal link buttons, add-ons (calendars, site meters), and hypertext links every time you switch templates. So decide on a template early in your experimentation.

I caution use of “free” add-ons like calendars, site stat meters, hit counters, weather reports, maps, and chatboxes. By adding these to your blog, you may encounter annoying, proliferating pop-up ads, promoting the paid services of such “free” add-on providers.

Add-ons may be useful to your blog. However, certain species can sometimes be nothing more than distracting clutter that makes your blog seem amateurish. Many experts advise against hit counters, calling them gimmicky relics from the early years of the internet.

I’m still looking into “ice cream truck blogs“, i.e., blogs that play music for visitors.

There seem to be some serious security concerns related to iWebTunes and allegations of adware and spyware attachments. The blogs allegedly become spyware delivery systems, infecting all blog visitors. This is a Blogspot problem. For now, I advise against any music on blogs, and I also advise against clicking on/selecting the “Next Blog” function in the top navbar of any Blogger/Blogspot blog, which could dump you into a blog that is running iWebTunes code.

Blogger offers several templates, but only a few are suitable to what I’m doing with my blogs. Each blog I operate has a different template, based on the audience and purpose of each blog.

For example, my Art Test Explosion blog, an online gallery of my original art, has a black background and reverse white type.

Reverse type (light color text against any background) is hard to read, except for short text, subheads, or headlines. This would not be good for a text-heavy blog, but since I have mostly art uploads and not much text at Art Test Explosion, the template works well.

Your template may include left or right hand columns in which you can insert blogrolls, ads, graphic buttons for browser promotions, blog directory buttons, reciprocal links, site meters, RSS feeds, profile links, post archives, links to your other sites, and other items.

Look at a variety of blogs and see what designs you like, and what you abhor. Check the top link popularity blog rankings at Technorati, Blogstreet, Daypop, and other tracking sites. Observe what designs the most popular blogs are using, not to imitate them, but as inspiration and reference.

(5.) Configure your settings.

Decide how you wish to treat such things as:

* Comment enabling (on, off, off for old posts only, registration required, moderation and delayed posting, use of “captchas” [Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart] to foil spambots, etc.). I strongly urge enabling users to post comments. Comment spam can be prevented or eliminated in many ways (see my post on the comment spam problem at Vaspers the Grate blog).

* Format (number of posts on main page, which users may scroll down to view: the rest of the posts will be stored in your blog’s “archives”). I suggest displaying from three to six posts on the main page, depending on how long your posts typically tend to be.

* Archiving (by date, topic, or other categorization).

* Time/Date Stamp (your time zone, mine is GMT minus 6 hours, and how you want it to appear). I recommend “March 2, 2005″ and not “01-02-05″, which could be interpreted as “January 2, 2005″ or “February 1, 2005″.

* Post URL (distinct URL or web address for each post you write, which enables users to link directly to the post, rather than to the blog, then have to search for the specific post). This is called “deep linking” and is highly recommended. When promoting your blog on other blogs and online forums, experts advise promoting a specific post relevant to a discussion, rather than providing a link to the main page of your blog.

* Site Feed (to enable users to subscribe to updates via RSS).

* Blogroll (via an automatic service or manually via template tinkering). The blogs you list as “Recommended Reading” on your own blog will impact user perception of who you are, and will drive traffic to the blogs you list. When bloggers check their referrer logs, and see that visitors came from your blog, they may check your blog and even add it to their blogroll.

* Email Notification (host sends you an email alerting you to new comments on your blog).

* Post Email (host enables you to post new articles via email directly to your blog).

* Ping (host enables you to “ping”, or electronically notify, various blog trackers automatically every time you update your blog with a new post).

* Email Post to Friend (host enables users to click on/select a function that provides a form whereby they may email a post on your blog to a friend).

* Trackback (host enables you to display other sites that mention your post).

* Permalink (users can access the specific URL for each post and bookmark it).

* Quick Edit (host enables you to click on/select a tool that takes you directly to edit function for each post).

(6.) Create Profile and Contact Info.

Blog hosts generally enable you to create a personal profile (”About Me”) page and a contact information page.

Be careful about which private details you include, but let users know you are a real person with real interests and credentials.

Business bloggers: list your education, published articles, books, seminars, conferences at which you’ve been a keynote speaker, interviews, professional associations to which you belong, code of ethics to which you are committed, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, lists of clients, samples of work, anything that will add credibility.

Business bloggers: display your firm’s physical address, post office box number, a land phone (not just a cell phone), fax number, skype number, non-harvestable email address (see below), and even directions to your building and parking instructions for visitors. I saw a local hospital web site that displayed special driving directions due to current road construction in their area. That’s user-friendly par excellance!

Personal bloggers: List hobbies, favorite films, books, music bands, sports teams, types of food, beverages. But please don’t list your home address or home phone number, don’t display photos of your children, don’t tell what city you live in, just the country. These cautions are to protect you from identity theft and the potential danger of predators and stalkers.

Display your email address in non-harvestable format:

steven [dot] streight [at] gmail [dot] com

This prevents spambots from crawling your blog and capturing your email address for spammers, con artists, slimebags, and virus senders.

(7.) Start posting.

How often you add new posts, and how long each post should be, is up to you.

Many experts advise frequent, even daily posts, and short length.

But an “event blog”, like a blog covering the Iraq elections, or the Asian tsunami disaster, could have new posts added every few minutes while news is being made.

Robert Scoble in his “The Red Couch” blog mentions a Microsoft blogger, Christopher Brumme, who posted once a month and each post is about 11,000 words (if I remember correctly). It was a blog about .NET Common Language Runtime.

Develop a distinct style, a unique “voice” that sets you apart from the 12 million other blogs out there in the “bloatosphere”.

You need a special reason why users should visit and return to your blog.

Use your personality, humor, experience, enthusiasm, education, training, research skills, product knowledge, whatever you’ve got that can provide value, information, or entertainment, to your readers.

(8.) Launch a strategic promotion campaign.

Organize the publicity efforts for your blog, whether business or personal.

* Blog title and URL in email signature, corporate letterhead, advertising specialty promotional items or “swag” (calendars, coffee mugs, caps, tee shirts, pens, mouse pads, etc.).

* List (”claim”) your blog in such blog directories as Blogarama, Blog Explosion, Blog Philosopher, Eaton Portal, and Blog Catalog.

* List (”claim”) your blog in such blog trackers as Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex, and Blogstreet.

* Post relevant, intelligent comments at other blogs, with your blog URL embedded in your name.

* Blog title and URL in business cards, brochures, tv and radio commercials, owners manuals, print ads, and web sites.

Concluding Remarks

Remember: just because you’ve got a blog, that doesn’t mean anybody’s reading it.

And, just because you don’t get a lot of comments, that doesn’t mean nobody’s reading it.

Users refrain from posting comments due to shyness, being inarticulate, fear of flaming (personal verbal attacks from other users), not having any knowledge to contribute to a specific topic, being in a big hurry, or simply withholding their precious insights due to selfishness.

As Seth Godin says repeatedly, don’t worry too much about marketing. Concentrate on improving your product or service, make it Remarkable and worthy of being spread like a virus.

So I say to you now, don’t worry too much about visitor traffic, visit duration, page views, link popularity, site statistics, or user comments.

Instead, focus on having something worth saying, something your readers need to hear, and saying it with all the intelligence and zeal you’ve got.

Make your blog Astonishing.

By golly, great Caesar’s ghost-you are now a real live blogger! Congratulations.

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