The Lifelong Learner         by Stanley Kubasek | About Me |

Some good information how to have a better blog.

1. Question, Guy Kawasaki: What can a blogger do to ascend the Technorati 100—or simply write a better blog, for that matter?

   Answer, David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati: There are no hard and fast rules, but I can provide a few guidelines that seem to have worked well for the preponderance of the blogs on the Top 100:

   • Post often and post at regular intervals. Ideally at least once a day, or even more often.

   • Figure out what kind of blogger you are. Are you a blogger who loves to collect links? Are you an essayist who loves to argue points of articulate new ideas? Are you a storyteller? Are you more comfortable with video, audio, photos, or text, or all three? Try stuff out and see what you feel most comfortable doing, and then try to stick to it.

   • Link prolifically. Give your readers the benefit of you preparing all of the source materials for them. Also, if you are rebutting or commenting on someone else’s idea or point, it is a sign of respect to link to them. The hyperlink is becoming a new form of social gesture used between people. Tools like Technorati also help you to find out who has linked to you, so when I see a blogger who has linked to me recently, I’m more inclined to discuss his or her ideas and link back to them, driving traffic and conversation.

   • Be honest. There are very few people who can get away with building up personas, and you probably aren’t one of them.

   • Write about what you know. It makes for much more engaging and interesting reading. I love blogs like English Cut, because he knows so much about the world of Saville Row and he writes about it.

   • Be Passionate. Nobody likes boring writing about boring subjects. First find your passion, then express it on your blog!

   • Practice, practice, practice. Your writing or podcasting or videoblogging—whatever will get better as you do it more. Keep it up.

   • Get a Technorati watchlist for your blog and for your name. Know when people are talking about you and be able to respond—either in comments on their blog, or even better, on your own blog, with a link to the other blog.

   • Get a full-text RSS and Atom feed. Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. I’d recommend a service like Feedburner to manage those feeds for you and get you stats.

   • Use tagging. Tags are an easy way to create open categories, and they help to make it easier to find your blog. You can get a tutorial with tools here.

   • Claim your blog and put in blog tags. This puts you into the world’s largest blog directory, Blogfinder, which already has over two million entries. And it means that if you write authoritatively about a certain topic, you’ll show up pretty high on the list for that topic. Which means you’ll get more traffic and new readers and links.

Reference
Ten Questions with David Sifry, Guy Kawasaki