Personal Blogging Guidelines - My Experience

• Talk your mind. Do not try to be a role model. Its about inspirations from within. People love true inspirations and not theoretical ones.
• Never try or force yourself to be politically correct
• Have variety, and do not narrow your focus areas when you start blogging
• You can talk about technology one day, talk about files, write jokes, critique someone, cite articles of influence, share links of interest, comment about current happenings.
• It is good to talk about lessons learnt, incidents and the aftermath introspection
• Don’t dwell too much on planning on advertisements, monetization etc. from day one. Focus first on
• Consistent writing
• Getting traction
• Increasing readership
• Once you have brought some consistency into you blogging,then think about
• Ads
• Donations (probably for your service work or personal)
• Referral networks
• Constantly, review your target or focus on why you are blogging
• If it is personal reflections, be that way until there are reasons to change. Remember your readership is based on what you have been writing and not on what you are going to write.
• Add utilities like
• FeedBurner with email subscription services and other services
• Podcasts from such folks as odiogo(or other competitors)
• Options to Digg it, Stumble it, email, share, add to technorati are all very good features for viewers
• Engage the readers: Invite thoughts, comments and feedback from them.
• If you think certain articles would be of interest to certain friends, email it to them.
• It might be a good idea to advertise your blog initially to gain some site visits. Here are my suggestions for the same.
• Use the ‘Status Message’ option available in instant messengers like Gtalk, Skype, Yahoo and MSN messenger.
• Signature on your personal email and/or mobile phones.
• Little bit of ‘viral marketing‘ could help
• Send introductory emails to friends and ask them to pass the information to others who might be interested in blog focus areas.
• Send messages to people on your IM list and ask them to pass the information to others who might be interested in blog focus areas.
• Add tags to your post appropriately. Check the do’s and don’t on how to tag, what to tag etc from the web. Also, its not a must to tag every post if you cant come up with anything instantaneously.
• Define the scope of the article. Make it a point to convey whether you are posting suggestions or conveying strong views. This is essential, as a passing reference to something in your blog shouldn’t be misconstrued in any different sense due to the ambivalent character of your expression.
• After reading your article, if someone suggests that you forward it to some concerned entity(be it a company or a person who might have vested interests in your article), please take efforts to do that. It could be that your article has some good suggestions to solve a society problem. If that is the case, try sending it to concerned authorities or newspapers who can carry it forward.
• Acknowledge friend’s name if he or she was the starting point of the article. May be you can return the favor by pointing to his blog.
• Wikipedia is an awesome resource, and therefore link words to Wikipedia. Many a time, you audience will definitely appreciate such wiki links. It will add more value to your article.

Tags: blogging guidelines