What does this mean? When a major event occurs in your life and especially in relation to your blog, don’t be afraid to share it. If you purchase a house or have a child, share your joy with your readers. If you’re linked to by a major site or reach a certain threshold that you set as a goal for yourself (500,000 visitors or 1,000 posts), let your readers know about it.

To put it bluntly, if something fills you with joy, share it. The optimism and happiness that comes from the event will flow out of your writing right to the reader and they will feel a bit of joy as well.

This doesn’t mean that you should flood your blog with stuff like My child just said “poop” for the first time! (unless you’re running a parenting blog or something). Save celebratory posts for truly major events, or semi-major events that relate to your blog.

Here are some tips about celebratory posts that will maximize their effectiveness and impact for the reader.

Mention events that match the theme of your blog. For example, since this is a personal finance blog, I’ve mentioned significant debt eliminations on here, such as the paying off of my truck better than a year early. It’s something that excited me greatly and it also fit the theme of this blog. I also plan on blogging (in detail) my first home purchase, which is coming in the next year.

Include a picture if possible. If you have a new house or a new child, a photo or two can really show the excitement of the moment. You can even post a video if you want; stick it up on YouTube and include that video in your post.

Don’t overdo it. If you experience a life-changing event, it’s great to mention it once in a celebratory manner, but don’t let it take over your blog. Your readers are there to read about the topic at hand, not your new child. A celebratory post is a great way to build attachment between the reader and the writer, but only if done occasionally. If the life change causes you to have a new major interest, start another blog. Very few blogs can make such a transition; dooce is the only one I can think of, as it changed from a professional rant blog into a parenting blog.

If you met a goal, set a new goal and talk about it. If you’re posting to announce your site has had 100,000 visitors, state what your next goal is, what you learned, and how you’re going to get there. If you’re posting to celebrate losing ten pounds, talk about how you did it and what you plan to do next. Make it about more than just meeting that specific goal and tossing confetti in the air.

And with that, the Building a Better Blog for 2007 series is finished. Let’s celebrate!

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. This is the final post in the series; you can jump back to the previous entry, Don’t Forget the Fundamentals.

Whenever I do this, I punch myself in the arm. Why? If I do it too often, a large bruise will start to appear, both on my arm and my blog. People will see it, not understand it, and avoid it.

How do you solve the problem of attracting beginning readers without alienating your regular audience? My solution is to make roughly one fifth of my posts focus specifically on very fundamental issues, such as the difference between APR and APY and how compound interest works. My regular readers usually read these as well and the posts tend to attract a lot of comments, as these experienced readers look for places to fill in holes that I’ve missed.

In short, occasional “fundamentals” posts do not alienate your regular reader base – and can attract new readers.

Here are several avenues you can take for identifying and writing posts on fundamental topics in your area.

Make a list. Take fifteen or so recent posts on your blog and make a list of every word that refers specifically to something within your domain. Maybe you write an art blog and you discuss artists all the time. Maybe you write about NPR and regularly refer to contributors. Maybe you write a financial blog and drop the term EPS all the time.

Write a blog post explaining, in your own words, what exactly each term means. Don’t assume the reader is stupid; treat them as if you are explaining the topic to a friend. Imagine, for example, that you’re a literature blogger and a friend stops over, pulls a book off your shelf, and asks, “What’s this about?” Would you talk down to that person? Probably not (unless you’re massively condescending). Imagine that the person you’re writing for is that friend who just pulled a book off the shelf.

Encourage comments on these posts. Such posts tend to attract lots of comments (for me, anyway), but it can’t hurt to even request comments at the end of that post. This encourages your regular audience to fill in gaps (and feel smart) and your new readers to ask questions that they might have. Never forget that blogging is a conversation and you’ll be fine.

Occasionally (not always), link to your explanation by linking the appearance of that word in future posts. Readers who come to your site and are confused as to who John Hodgman is or what APY is can just click on the word and be whisked to another blog post on that specific topic.

After you’ve done a lot of these, post a compendium. This post can just list all of the “fundamentals” posts you’ve made. Once you’ve created this, add it to your site’s sidebar along with a link that says something like “Getting Started” or “[Your Topic] 101.” This way, when new readers come along, they at least have a chance to understand your most recent “deep” post.

Your content will bring new readers to the site, but if you put forth a bit of extra effort to make their entrance easier, they might just stay around for a while.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Celebrate With Your Readers, or back to the previous one, Don’t Clutter It Up.

Simplicity is good; clutter is bad. Successful sites generally keep the clutter in the sidebar and out of the way of the primary article. Even clutter outside of the primary article can be bad if it’s unclear and without obvious purpose to the casual reader.

Quite often, the design intention is good: a blogger wants more things that are useful on the site. The problem comes in when a casual reader arrives and is overwhelmed by options that are less than clear. Here are several common mistakes that some bloggers make when designing their site.

Social bookmarking icons We’ve all seen the row of icons that covers the bottom of a post, each one linking to a different social bookmarking site, right? If you haven’t, here’s an example. For casual users, these are just plain confusing, even if you have a tool tip popping up that says “add to furl” or “add to delicious” … those statements make little sense to people who are just searching Google for a key piece of information. On the other hand, for experienced users, the icons are still a waste because most of us have our social bookmarking sites of choice already integrated into our browser toolbar. These icons don’t have an audience and they’re just distracting to most users.

Site metadata icons These include buttons that link to Feedburner and to other sites that aggregate RSS feeds, as well as to all sorts of additional sites. An example of this that doesn’t go too far into overkill can be found on the right hand bar of pfblogs.org. These are fine in small doses – one or two that link to something interesting can be fun – but some sites go into overload mode and the whole thing becomes distracting for the casual user.

“Gadgets” Many people have a penchant for including gadgets of all kinds on their site, often in multiples. For an example, see User Generated Content, which includes several such gadgets on his right hand bar. While these are all right for a personal site, if a casual user pops in, it’s basically information overload time and they back away slowly. I recommend never using more than one such gadget, and making sure that it aligns appropriately with the rest of your content.

The most important thing to remember at all times is that a visitor comes to your site to read the latest postings and nothing else. The more things that you throw at this user, particularly those that create a “busy” display, the harder it is for that casual visitor to read your post. Thus, it’s always better to minimize the extraneous material on your site and focus on your content above all.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Forget the Fundamentals, or back to the previous one, Talking to Other Bloggers.

So why write about talking to other bloggers? Simple. Since I started The Simple Dollar, every time I have engaged a blogger outside of my own “circle” of blogging associates, the interaction has been worthwhile. This even includes somewhat negative interactions, like my debate with several non-personal finance bloggers over Wesabe. This positive response may be surprising to some (including myself, as I didn’t have this experience with earlier blogs), but I’ve found there are several keys to positive interactions with other bloggers.

Before you begin, though, you should define what you’re looking for. I’m often looking for intelligent people to discuss things with; usually, this comes down to finding an interesting blog that covers a topic I’m unfamiliar with. If the blog is interesting enough that it makes me want to become familair with the topic, then I don’t hesitate to write to the author of the blog. This may or may not lead to links, but for me I don’t really care too much – it’s about meeting new people and growing as a person, which will in itself improve me and by extension my blog.

First, never begin an interaction by merely asking for a link. This is, of course, assuming that you want to actually want to begin a worthwhile discussion with that blogger; if all you want is a link, then go right ahead and ask. If you open up by asking for a link, you’re basically telling that blogger that all you want is something from him or her.

Second, try to engage the blogger right off the bat. The best way to do this is to ask questions about their blog, both content-specific and otherwise. If you’re engaged enough to write to the blogger, you’re probably engaged enough to have read several posts, so they should be able to provide you with enough fodder to ask questions.

Write something engaging that can trigger a response. A frothing “I luv ur blog!” email will make a popular blogger smile, but it won’t get anything in return. Since you’re hoping to establish a conversation, you’re going to need something more meaty than that. You can express an admiration for their blog, but there needs to be more content to your email, particularly something that triggers a response.
Include a link to your own blog, but don’t shove it in their face. I usually just include it as my signature right beneath my name, just enough so that if they find my email interesting, they might click on it. I usually don’t mention it any more than that at first unless they ask about it.
Look for opportunities to meet other bloggers. I live in rural Iowa, so my opportunities to meet other successful bloggers are rather slim, but I am always looking for opportunities for blogger meetups and conventions. Attending such events can not only bring about interactions with other bloggers, but it can also make you feel much better about your own blog, reinvigorating you with the spirit to blog.

Remember, above all, blogging is a conversation and bloggers are good conversationalists.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Clutter It Up, or back to the previous one, Engage the Casual Visitor.

What do these situations have in common? Obviously, these readers found your site through methods that didn’t involve your direct recruitment. They were drawn to your site because of a specific piece of content that relates to them somehow. Even more important, this reader is often highly uninformed about your topic of discussion, but is seeking some piece of information related to your topic.

The question is how do you convert these viewers into long-term viewers. Here are some suggestions to keep those viewers on your blog and perhaps convert them to regular readers.

Give them lots of opportunities within the post to dig in further. Link specific points in new posts to appropriately-related articles from your archives. This encourages the interested reader to click on the link, which will take them to another article that might answer their question. Of course, this post should also have specific points linked to archived posts and so on. Don’t rely on these links, though; your post should express a full thought on its own without links. The links merely serve as a way to expand thoughts and to pull in the interested reader.

List related posts. Whenever a user sees a post, they should find links to similar posts on your site. This is particularly true for search engine visitors: once they find a page on your site, it may or may not answer their question, but similar posts might address their needs, and providing a link will keep a user reading, which is what you want. For WordPress users, there’s a great plugin that does this automatically; for users of other blogging software, you may have to really work to find other ways to do this.
Make some of your best posts easily available. You should keep a list of your best posts either directly on your sidebar or on a page linked to on your sidebar. If a person visits from a search engine or a social bookmarking site, they’re looking for good stuff, so pointing them to potential sources of good stuff is always a strong idea.

Engage them directly. If a post of yours shows up on a social bookmarking site, you might want to stick a paragraph that introduces your site on the top of that popular post for a week or so. This paragraph should include a one-sentence description of your site and a few links to your absolute best posts. Although I don’t usually follow this practice, I have seen it be successful in practice, particularly if your blog is rather obscure and this is your one moment to be seen by a large group.

Answer your email if at all possible. Quite often, casual viewers will fling a question at you if they see your site and are interested, but you didn’t immediately sate their interest. This is an opportunity to, in the worst case, pick up a reader or, in the best case, pick up a lot of readers. Answer courteously, quickly, and accurately if at all possible. If you’re to the point where you’re receiving dozens of legitimate emails an hour, you can reconsider this, but your blog is probably so successful you have no reason to be reading this, anyway.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Talking to Other Blogggers, or back to the previous one, Post Consistently.

First of all, your posting schdule does not have to be daily (or more than daily). The Marketing Profs give a very good explanation why the supposed “rule” of a daily post is no longer important. And they’re right, to an extent: you don’t have to post every day. Instead, you need to find your own rhythm and then develop a schedule that utilizes that rhythm for regular posting. Do not buy into the hype that you have to post daily or several times a day; you don’t.

Rather than just blindly accepting a pace that you might be unable to follow, spend a few weeks determining your “normal” pace. Write for your blog as you would write normally without worrying about any post requirement. Make sure that this timeframe is rather normal and doesn’t include any irregular events that would cause significant downtime in your posting. Once you’ve completed three weeks or so, count up your posts and divide by the number of days. This is your “normal” pace of posting.

Once you’ve figured out your normal posting pace, toss it out the door. Although it’s a great number to use in defining your posting schedule, it’s a poor number to base your whole posting schedule on. Why? If you post at this rate, you’ll eventually fall behind and give up. Period.

Instead, calculate what 60% of your normal posting pace is, and use this as a schedule. For me, my “normal” posting rate is about ten posts a day (yes, many of them are this length; yes, I’m a logorrheic anomaly). Thus, my baseline schedule is about six posts a day. For many people, it could be that their normal flow is about a post a day, so their schedule should be about six posts every ten days.

Once you’ve figured out your approximate schedule, arrange it so you have fewer posts on the weekends and more posts on weekdays. For example, I post between six and seven posts per weekday (the seventh post is usually part of a cursorily-related series, like this blogging one) and three to four posts per weekend day (the fourth post is usually part of that series). If you’re posting six posts every ten days, then plan for posts every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Now you have a posting schedule that matches your natural flow of writing well. Except… as you start with it, you’ll find yourself building up an excess of posts. What should you do with them?

When you have excess posts, set them up to be automatically posted as if you won’t be updating in the near future. If you post along normally, you’ll begin to build up a block of unposted future posts. Give them each a posting time so that they’ll post according to your schedule if you find yourself unable to post due to an emergency or a planned vacation. At various times, I’ve had almost three weeks of future posts built up for The Simple Dollar.

If you have a timely post that needs to go up now, just swap it for the next post and put the removed post at the back of the line.

In the end, what you’ll have is a blogging schedule that enables you to naturally be ahead of pace and prepared for the event of a disaster so that you don’t leave your audience hanging.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Engage the Casual Visitor, or back to the previous one, Write in Series.

Most people think of series in a very limited fashion: a detailed enumeration of a list, for example. The fact is that a series is merely any collection of posts with a common theme among them, and a well-executed series is one that provides a lot of post ideas right off the bat. Take this series, for example: it was borne out of simply making a list of the lessons I’ve learned from blogging and suddenly realizing that most of these ideas make for a good post by themselves. It wasn’t enumerated or anything; it was merely a random collection of ideas on a theme.

In fact, most successful blogs use series in some respect. This is because the benefits of writing in series are numerous: it provides a forum for a more detailed investigation of an issue than a single blog post really offers, it provides fodder for a number of blog posts, and the continuation of a series provides a lot of incentive for readers to continue tuning in.

Here are some tips for defining and executing series in your blog.

Start off with a list. If you have a “big” central idea, try making a list of the ideas within this idea that you’d like to cover. The thread between these sub-ideas is the core of a series and that list can be the starting point for a large number of posts. Even better: if you can find a pre-established list of ideas, someone has handed you a list to work with. For an example of the latter, see my rewrite of a list from Money Magazine.
Don’t post them all at once. Your readers can get overwhelmed if you post a lot of posts on a single topic. Don’t post all of the members of a series at once; instead, recognize this as a great opportunity to keep something in reserve.

When you finish a list, neaten it up. Make sure that members of a list link to an overall master post and also link directly to the “next” item in the series. This is difficult to do while you’re posting the series, but when you finish it, it’s well worth your time to add these options. Why? A reader from a search engine that is drawn into the article at all will be willing to follow links to more items in the series.

Have some consistency with the titles. Bloggers will be interested to know when you post a new item in the series, so be sure to include the name of the series in each post in the series. This also aids those terms (in the title of the series) to appear as terms related to your blog on search engines.

A series is not only a great way to continually provide ideas and posts for your blog even when you’re suffering from a creative drought, but it can also engage your audience and keep them coming back for more.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Post Consistently, or back to the previous one, Use the Senses.

Take, for example, the image of Suze Orman to your upper right. For those unaware, Suze is a well-known personal finance guru who uses a “trendy” personality to help promote her advice. Because of her prevalence, I occasionally post commentary on her, and so I use that image in posts about Suze.

Yet there are often times in which images are a negative. Serious sites that occasionally use highly goofy images are doing themselves a disservice. Poorly executed images are a great way to chase away your readers; instead, look for images that will intrigue your reader base.

There are several useful keys to consider when using images:

Photoshop is your friend. If you are unfamiliar with using Photoshop or GIMP, you should learn to use one of these packages at least well enough to do basic image editing and modification. These tools allow you to create and modify images to your heart’s content. This is particularly true if you relied on someone else to do the visual design of your site, as you’re likely reliant on other’s images for anything you might include. Don’t let this be the case: learn some Photoshop and let your imagination lead.

Make it visually striking, but not distracting. If you use an image that blends in with the rest of the post, it will be harder for the reader to become engaged with the picture. On the other hand, an image that flashes or blinks can actually distract the reader from reading. The goal is to find images that will attract the reader’s eye upon first visiting the site, but don’t restrict the reader from reading the article. The best choice is a visually attractive still image.

Ensure that the image relates to the article. People often post pictures that they find amusing in articles that have no relation to the image. As a reader, I get really confused by this: “Why is there a picture of Hulk Hogan in a story about fabric softener?” If you post an image, make sure it connects to the story in some way, either in an obvious way that doesn’t require explanation or in a less-obvious way that becomes clear upon reading.

Be careful with humor. I usually try to avoid humor in image form simply because of the diverse audience. If you have a clear indication that your readership would prefer highbrow or lowbrow humor, then you’re much safer, but I’m less confident about my readership (while I feel pictures of celebrities with Photoshopped comments is too lowbrow, reprinted New Yorker cartoons might be overdoing it). My one recent attempt at a humorous image (see right) didn’t do so well.

If you can use the picture for subtle commentary, do so! Recently, I offered up some commentary on Jim Cramer, a stock analyst who hosts a show on CNBC. Jim is known for being loud, fairly aggressive, and having anger management issues, which is actually part of his appeal. Seeing this, I tried to create an image of Jim that represented these aspects of his personality without creating an “evil” look. One glance at the picture to your upper right will tell you whether I succeeded or not.

Along with this, consider the possibility of using words that evoke the other senses: descriptive terms that relate sense, smell, sound, and touch. Some blogs may never have the opportunity to use these, but food, audio, and textile blogs are well-served to learn many adjectives.

One big recommendation: don’t force audio on your readers. If you choose to embed a sound clip, make sure that it does not play by default. If I visit a site that automatically plays noise, I will never return to that site as it is attacking my sense of hearing (and the sense of hearing of others around me) without my choice. Keep in mind how people in quiet environments (such as the library) might feel if bombarded with audio.

The more dimensions you use to engage the reader, the more likely they are to stick around and listen to what you have to say.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Write in Series, or back to the previous one, Don’t Know It All.

What this individual didn’t realize is that effective interpersonal communication is a conversation, not a lecture. If I want to be lectured, I will go sign up for a college course and let a professor lecture; he’s earned the privilege by earning a high degree in the topic.

The same philosophy holds true on the internet. If you ride a topic until there’s nothing left to say about it, you’ve effectively killed the conversation. People come to your blog to get a quick summary of the topic, some directions for future thought, and some links to more resources on the thought. They don’t come there to have a topic written about to oblivion.

This is particularly challenging for a logorrheic individual like myself, so how do I find a balance between writing what feels right for me and writing a subject to death? Here’s what I use as a guideline.

Don’t write more than two hundred words on a single point. If you’re doing that, you’re writing too much. If you have extensive thoughts on a topic, try breaking things down into smaller sections that are easily digestible by your readers.

Don’t regurgitate other’s thoughts. Don’t relate in your own words what someone else says on the topic. Link to them and/or quote them, but don’t paraphrase them. This is the equivalent of stepping in front of someone in a conversation and saying, “What he means to say is…”; no one appreciates that.

Leave interesting threads in other directions, but don’t follow all of them. If you try to follow every train of thought that exists, your post will get long and boring very quickly. Let some of those threads of thought dangle; you don’t need to follow up on everything or simply excise them from the post.

Engage others in conversation, too. If you read a good post at another site, make it the start of your own post, but follow the guidelines here. Link to them and quote them, but don’t paraphrase them, and just add your own contributions to the thought. You don’t need to cover every angle, just continue the conversation.

Stick to your interests. I have no interest in talking about politics, for example, so when I start to rub up against politics, I let a thread or two dangle and run away quickly. What happens when you brush up against a topic, but stick to what you know? Readers are engaged.

Don’t be a know it all; practice good conversational skills instead.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Use the Senses, or back to the previous one, Social Bookmarking.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want their site to have a huge spike in popularity? In fact, for some bloggers, it becomes so tempting that it becomes an obsession: can I sneak this post onto the front page of digg (or some similar site)? They wind up writing in order to grab cheap clicks and spend their time trolling the social bookmarking sites hoping to see another vote in their favor; meanwhile, their site is actually becoming less popular because the posts are no longer focused on the target audience and they’re appearing less frequently.

Chasing fame on social bookmarking sites is a doomed exercise. You might occasionally make a big splash, but your average day-to-day traffic will suffer as your regular audience moves on. Eventually, you’ll grow disheartened as the “valleys” between those social bookmarking “mountains” become lower and lower and soon your blog has lost all direction.

Here are some healthy tips for success with social bookmarking sites while keeping the focus of your blog in perspective.

Don’t promote yourself. Never submit a page of your own to a social bookmarking site unless you’re an involved member of that community. Regular users will check you out and if they see you’re a low-frequency submitter who only submits from one site, they’ll vote you down out of principle. This happened to me with a previous site on digg – I submitted pages from my site every once in a while and soon they were getting buried quite quickly with comments that indicated that I was spamming the site… which I was.

The pros and cons of links to social bookmarking on your site. Once upon a time, I included lots of links to social bookmarking sites at the bottom of each of my posts – and they got me nowhere. Since removing them, I’ve had much greater success with social bookmarking sites. Why is this? Many people see those icons as being pure self-promotion and they won’t bother to ever click them and leave with a bad taste in their mouth. These icons can sometimes even lead to downvotes on such social bookmarking sites. Although you’re somewhat more likely to have a page submitted to a social site with those links, your chances at striking gold are lessened – and they’re potentially damaging to your long-term audience.

Write compelling content for your audience above all. If it is truly compelling, someone will submit it to social bookmarking sites for you. Both times I’ve popped up on major social bookmarking sites, it has been rather surprising (usually, this surprise has involved watching my site dead in the water for a little while, but I digress). I have considered that some of my posts might do well on various social bookmarking sites, but the ones that actually made it were a bit out of the blue (in one case, the post was kind of old when it appeared).

Don’t be afraid to reach out. The stuff that becomes popular on social bookmarking sites is often examples of people looking at common things through a different light. One way to do this without alienating your audience is by simply reaching out: look for new angles on your topic and research it appropriately. Every time I’ve had success with social bookmarking, it’s been as a result of reaching out.

In short, if your audience appreciates your writing, your best stuff will organically find its way onto social bookmarking sites. Thus, your focus should be on maintaining and growing your audience, not gaming social bookmarking sites.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Know It All, or back to the previous one, Don’t Chase Away Your Readers.

What’s the moral of the story here? Don’t scare away your readers. This seems like a simple idea, but it does require some forethought and it does require a bit of a filter on your thoughts. Although some will see a “thought filter” as being anathema to what their blogging experience should be, it’s a simple fact that some statements will drive away some readers. If this is a bargain you’re willing to accept, it’s your choice, but you should be aware of that fact.

How do you know if you’re going to chase away your audience, though? Before anything else, you need to clearly define who exactly your audience is. Figure out as many details about your “average reader” as you possibly can and develop a real profile for who exactly is reading your site. Is your reader likely to be a pop culture junkie? Are they liberal or conservative, or is it too hard to tell? Are your readers free spirits or the accountant type?

Here are some tips for making sure that you don’t accidentally frighten your readership into clicking away from your site.

If your audience holds a certain belief to be central, don’t insult that belief. For example, let’s say you write about Christian theology, but through this study you discover that you are an atheist. Your site likely has a highly Christian audience, so if you proceed to post a bunch of atheist positions, you’re likely going to destroy the audience you’ve built up. Similarly, if you post on financial issues, your audience is likely politically neutral with a slight lean towards the conservative. It would be a very poor choice to start a campaign for Dennis Kucinich for President in 2008 on your blog.

If you’re writing to adults (on non-”adult” themes, obviously) and your mother would be offended, don’t post it. Consider this: many blogs are read while people are burning extra time at the office. They click through the site and see a picture of a nearly-nude woman or of a man holding up a sign with an offensive slogan on it. How long do you think that window will be open? Not long, indeed. Remember that your readers are mature adults and minimize the content that might not be socially acceptable.

Avoid some topics entirely. Unless you’re writing specifically about a controversial topic, you’re better off avoiding it entirely unless your main topic of focus can offer a really useful and unique perspective on it. I have no intent to ever discuss abortion or sexual topics on this site; they just don’t fit and all they would do is either antagonize or scare off my readers. Even if I’m thinking about those topics, it’s just not a good choice to post them here.

Whenever you post, remember what the potential limits of your audience are and try not to push those limits too hard, or else you’ll see your traffic decreasing over time.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Social Bookmarking, or back to the previous one, The Mini Audience.

Obviously, if your audience is broad, you have the potential to reach a very wide audience of readers, which is a good thing. However, broad generalizations rarely resonate with your readers. If I write a very, very general post about personal finance issues that tries to encompass everyone, I’ll bore almost my entire audience by either writing something too basic to be useful or too broad to be worthwhile.

The key to getting around this problem is defining a number of “mini” audiences. Whenever you write a post for a blog with a wide general audience, you are going to strongly engage a segment of the audience and very weakly engage other segments of the audience. If you want to keep the weakly engaged segments around, you need to regularly write posts that will deeply engage them as well.

Here are some ideas that will help you define and write for audiences within your audience.

Make a list of sub-interests within your topic. Within your area, what are some of the specific sub-topics that you write about? For me, I have a plethora of them: frugality, debt management, financial planning, investment advice, and so on. What are yours? Often, this will overlap strongly with a list of categories for your site.

Occasionally, check that you’re writing posts for each of these sub-topics. If there’s one you’ve neglected lately, that’s likely an area that you can focus on in the near future. Even better: giving yourself a very narrow focus for a new post can often fuel your creative juices.

Follow the interests in as many subtopics as you can. Someone out there is likely writing about a specific sub-topic that you want to include. Bookmark that blog or subscribe to its feed and follow what they’re saying. For example, professional blogging as an income stream is one topic that I follow for The Simple Dollar, so I keep in touch with sites like ProBlogger. Another example? I like to write about money saving technologies, so I also follow Lifehacker. I also write about parenting issues as they relate to money lessons and saving money, so I keep tabs with parent hacks.

Write occasional posts for specific or even individual readers. If a writer writes to you with a specific question or idea, it’s almost always a good idea to see if this will transform into a post. Often, the person emailing you has hit upon some sort of specific niche that isn’t being covered at the moment by your blog – but nearby niches are, which means that there are readers out there that you could intensely engage with a post that touches on the topic of the reader’s contact.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Chase Away Your Readers, or back to the previous one, Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Matter.

First, what exactly does SEO do? SEO helps you to improve search engine placement by helping you identify and accentuate keywords and keyphrases on your website so that search engines such as Google will rank you highly for those keywords. Their advice revolves around several points: use your keywords and keyphrases on every page, get a lot of inbound links, and make sure that you continually have fresh content.

I argue that a good, healthy blog already does this.

First, keywords and keyphrases already appear on most of your pages. If you’re writing a focused and well-written blog, you will already be using your site’s keywords over and over without even trying. For example, the site you’re reading will have the phrase “personal finance” all over the place because I write about personal finance. The same holds true for “debt,” “investing,” and many other related terms. Why? That’s what I write about. Thus, these phrases come up again and again in my natural writing.

Second, a well written blog will simply draw inbound links. As long as you participate in the community and reach out on occasion, your site will automatically gain links from a variety of other sites – carnival links, links from your comments on other sites, and links from people who just discover you and add links to your compelling work. These links add up over time, and their diversity will appeal to the search engines: your work must be important because it’s linked from a huge number of pages.

Finally, a blogger always has fresh content. The simple practice of blogging means that you’re regularly updating your content and generating new pages. Basic blog design will ensure that these pages are interlinked, meaning that any internal pages you have that are heavily linked will boost your homepage and other pages on your site.

Search engine optimization does work, but most of the principles will cause much larger boosts on static sites than on blogs. Why? Blogs naturally do the things that SEO groups recommend. Note that I am not saying that SEO is worthless for blogs; I’m just saying that in the larger scheme of things, a blog owner is better served focusing on design and content than on SEO tricks.

Here are ten things your blog should be doing already that will help with search engine optimization. If you’re doing these, then you’re already doing enough; focus on the content instead.

Basic META tags should be in your template. Each page should have a META description tag and META keywords tag, but adding these to the site is as easy as dropping them into your template file. Make them once and they’ll be a part of your site for good.

Each page should link back to your main URL. That way, if/when an individual post becomes very popular, it will lift your homepage (and other internal pages) due to the associated rank.

All of your posts should be accessible by clicking links from the home page. This means that your homepage should link to archives, and these archives should link to all of your posts. This way, search engines can find every post on your site.

The name of each post should be in the title of that page. Most search engines give preference to page titles that contain the entire search term, so make sure that your blog uses the title of the post in the title of the page. Usually the name of your site and the title of the post is more than sufficient for a title for an individual post.

The name of each post should ideally be in the URL of that page. Many search engines give preference to page that contain the entire search term in the raw URL, so make sure that your blog uses the title of the post in the URL in some form.

Keep your pages fairly short. Don’t have individual pages that are more than 250 KB in length if at all possible. Search engines often stop at lengths in this range.

If you’re doing all of these things, you’re already ahead of many people. Now, sit back and focus on the content; the incoming links are the next big part you need, and content does that better than anything.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, The Mini Audience, or back to the previous one, Leverage the Past.

Let’s say you’ve been working hard on your blog for six months, and it’s been growing an audience at a rate of 5% a week. At the start of your seventh month, 66% of your audience has never read any of your earliest work, and that’s assuming no audience turnover at all. In other words, every six months, the vast majority of your audience is unfamiliar with your work that is six months or older.

This is an opportunity. You have an audience that you can expose to some of your best writing for the first time. You also have the power to accentuate your posts with additional information, increasing the mindspace of your blog. Even better? You have a great opportunity to get more pageviews from an average visitor.

Here are some guidelines for leveraging your older posts.

Link related points in your new posts to old posts from your archives. If you reference a topic that you wrote about in the past, add a link to it. Often, merely linking the point in your new post directly to the post in your archive is the best approach, as it allows readers to dig in deeper if the topic interests them. Over time, you’ll link together sequences of these, leading people deeper and deeper into your archives. It becomes something of an organic site tour, leading people through threads of thought.

Post surveys of your archives. Every once in a while, you can post surveys of your archives. These posts can be pure retrospectives, providing a selection of links of your best older work to new readers. These are often great posts for the end of the year, or for filling space while you’re on a vacation from your blog.

If you’re using WordPress, try out the related entries plugin. This plugin automatically finds posts potentially related to your current post and appends them, giving your readers quick links to additional writings in your blog similar to the topic at hand. This is very good if your site is full of content-heavy posts, as the tool will automatically find supplemental content (and potential page views) for every post you make.

Maintain a “greatest hits” section of your site. Keep a brief list of some of the most popular posts on your site and link to this archive on every page. This allows every casual reader to your site to quickly find some of your best work. Keep the list short, though, or else you may overload the attention span of casual visitors and they won’t visit anything at all.

Don’t replace new content with old content. Some blogs figure out that leveraging your archives can be an easy way to generate post counts, so they load up their site pointing to old posts all of the time. After a while, it becomes really clear to the audience that these blogs have nothing new to say. In short, leverage your archives, but don’t lean on your archives.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Search Engine Optimization Doesn’t Matter, or back to the previous one, Guide Your Users.

Quite often, though, this means I have a big block of solid text, a nearly unpenetrable slab of words that, as a reader, I would only penetrate if the topic or first few sentences drew me in. Some people are gifted storytellers and have that talent, but most of us need to make our writing navigable to our readers so that they can quickly find out what the point is and whether or not it’s worth digging into the details.

Writing for a blog is quite a bit different than writing for print media. With print media, you can assume that you at least have a bit of time to draw in the reader, but with online media, the reader has many, many other things that are just a mouse click away. You need to draw the reader’s attention quickly, or else they’ll leave.

In short, you have to be able to guide your readers. You need to not only guide them through your posts, but you need to also be able to guide them quickly to other posts of yours that will interest them. Rather than seeing the short attention span of a blog reader as a disadvantage, you can use it to your advantage and rack up lots of page views in the process.

Here are several tips for guiding your users through your posts and your site.

Use bold and emphasis to highlight key thoughts. Whenever you make a major point, particularly in longer posts, encase it in bold and emphasis tags. These will embolden or italicize those pieces and make them stand out to your readers, enabling them to quickly flip through your post, get the general message you’re providing, and dig into the areas that interest them. This enables your message to reach the reader within the constraints of a shorter attention span.

Arrange your post in a sensible order. Make sure your key points follow each other in an order that makes sense. Usually, this is best done by writing a draft of a post, saving it, and reading it again later; the appropriate order of the points will be much clearer when you read it again with fresh eyes.

Provide links to related materials. If you have posts on the same topic in your archives, make sure that you provide links to the older posts. This allows readers to quickly find more material on the subject if they’re interested.

Provide links to archives. Your site needs to have clear access to your archives. If readers enjoy your posts, they’re going to want to read more of what you’ve written.

Include some general highlights. It’s useful to create a page on your site that includes a number of your best posts. Make this page accessible on your menubar so that readers can quickly find a sampling of your best writing.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Leverage the Past, or back to the previous one, Be Lucky.

The simple truth is that it’s luck. Finding that certain thing that gets other people engaged is an inexact science at best and a complete roll of the dice at worst. But, unquestionably, it is these “lucky” moments that cause your readership to really take off.

But luck at blogging is much like luck at many other games: it exists, but the winners are the ones who are able to leverage that luck so that it works for them rather than against them. They create situations where luck is more likely to work in their favor.

Here are several ideas for making luck exist for you – and how you can take advantage of it.

Expose yourself. Try to establish relationships with other bloggers and with your readers. Respond to comments and don’t be insular. Don’t be afraid to just send an email to a blogger about something that interests you on their site – you’ll open the door to a relationship that will likely make you both fans of each other’s blogs and will help highlight the things you do that are exceptional.

Expose your good work. If you think something you’ve written is potentially interesting, don’t be afraid to ask for the thoughts of others on it. In most cases, it’s highly tacky to ask for a link; instead, just send the link out to people you know or post it on a messageboard and just ask for their thoughts on the topic. Don’t overdo this, though; save it for things that you think have a strong potential to break out. If nothing else, it might help you to get a better feel for your audience.

Write potentially interesting stuff. This seems hard, especially if you’re trying to come up with enough to write about already, but it provides a great filter for you to not spend your time on boring ideas. If you come up with an idea, simply ask yourself whether or not you’d have an interest in reading this post if it was on another blog. If the answer’s no, then you should probably toss that idea and look for another one.

Focus on your feed readers. I often read The Simple Dollar through a feed reader because it strips my site down to the bare content. What stands out? What’s interesting? What’s boring? Quite often, posts that seem great on the regular site seem less interesting here, and posts that made me yawn as I was creating them pop to life once the constraints of the site are removed.

Look at what’s hot elsewhere. If you see a news story and have an immediate interesting response, you might be onto something worthwhile. The same thing goes for new fads as they’re breaking; if you see something really interesting elsewhere, mention it and link to it. This way, if you have an interesting thought on a topic that’s becoming prominent, others will likely find you organically.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Guide Your Users, or back to the previous one, Don’t Give Up.

This is perhaps the most important period in the life of your blog, and this moment is what separates successful blogs from unsuccessful ones. Successful blogs are the ones that reach this point and keep going, doing whatever they need to do to keep on posting.

I’m not suggesting a big recommitment to the site; these usually never work and end up in failure. Instead, the best way to keep the relationship alive is to rediscover where exactly the value is in your blog.

What you’ll find out, in the end, is that what really separates blogging from other venues of writing is the people. You are very, very close to your audience when you’re a blogger and they’re with you with every single word you post. It is this relationship that is the heart of blogging, and it is people that often provide the impetus to keep it up.

Here are some ideas for keeping the flame alive.

Save the powerful comments and emails. Whenever someone posts a comment or sends you an email telling you how much they enjoy your blog, save that email in a folder somewhere. Then, when things get rough, read through the emails in that folder. Remember how much your writing has really impacted people.

Get inspired again. Read those blogs that really spurred you into blogging. For me, when I get down, I read dooce, lifehacker, and several others. Their words and interesting ideas remind me again and again how powerful and amazing blogging can be.

Talk to fellow bloggers. Relationships with fellow bloggers are vital in keeping things up. If you don’t have a forum to communicate with other bloggers, then just look for similar blogs to yourself and just strike up a conversation. Ask them why they blog and what keeps them motivated.

Post a survey for your readers. Ask them what they like about the site – and also what they don’t like. The important part is that surveys like this often reveal that what you’re blogging is important to someone, and it is this sense of importance that provides a new direction for blogging.

Slow down your posting schedule. Some people become overwhelmed by the expectation of posting every single day, or three times a day, or twice a week – whatever their schedule is. If you find yourself feeling like you can no longer keep up, just back off with the posting schedule for a while. I’d suggest halving it on a trial basis; go to posting every other day, or three posts every two days, and see how that fits you.

Take a break. Allow yourself a certain amount of time to just step away from the blog, with a commitment to return in a week or two weeks. Although I’d encourage you to leave your readers with something to remember you by, it’s more important that you get your mindset right for the long haul. Step away if you have to, but step away with a plan.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Be Lucky, or back to the previous one, Money Doesn’t Matter.

The truth is that many people dream about becoming professional bloggers, but after blogging for a month, they peek at their AdSense account, see they’ve only earned $1.03, and they get very disheartened. They slow down their posting and move on to other things. A few months later, they see they’ve only earned $1.54 total and they abandon it entirely.

The problem is that they’re viewing their success by an unrealistic yardstick. In order to build up any significant amount of income on your site, you have to have readers. Once you have a lot of readers, money will start to drift in, but money simply won’t come without readers.

The real measure of a blog’s worth is its audience. There is no other measure of long-term success. Anyone that tells you otherwise is telling you a fairy tale to sell a product, likely an SEO tool.

Why is this so? Isn’t a measure of an item’s worth the amount of money it generates? Of course. I’ll use a simple analogy to explain. Your readership is much like the money you’ve invested over time; it’s the result of a lot of hard work and effort. Similarly, a blog’s income is the equivalent to the return on that investment. If you have a lot of money invested, you can expect a solid return on that money, right? But expecting great income from a blog with only a few readers is like putting ten dollars in a mutual fund and expecting to quickly become a millionaire.

In short, the income from your blog is pretty much the worst measure of success that you can have unless you’re near the top of the top blogs on Technorati. It’s similar to saying that you’re not a success because your investments only made $1 this year, but you only invested $10 to begin with.

Another wrinkle is that there is no strict relationship between readers and income outside of “more readers means more income”. There are countless variables in this relationship: total readers, propensity of readers to click on ads, value of your keywords, the current status of people participating in the advertising program, and so on.

What it comes down to is that you should measure your success based on your readership, not on your total income. The total income will come slowly, and it will vary; if you’re looking to get rich quick, you’ll never be successful blogging.

What metrics can you use for success, then? Here are a few good ones.

Google Analytics Sign up for Google Analytics to keep track of the visits and page views on your blog. It does a splendid job of showing you a wide diversity of angles on the visitors to your site, but two big measures of success are repeat visitors and pages per visitor. Whenever you can build increases on either one, your site is doing well.

Comment count Whenever people comment on your site, that means they’re taking an active interest in what you’re writing. Once they’ve reached the point of commenting, you’ve engaged them. Keep the conversation alive and you’ll do nothing but build up your investment in readers.

Feed readers Hook yourself up with Feedburner to keep track of your feed readers. Some people argue that people who read feeds are just gobbling your bandwidth, but the truth is that they are readers who are engaged enough with your site to incorporate it into their regular reading regimen. They’ll visit your individual posts and, even better, many feed readers are bloggers themselves who will link to you when you’re interesting.

Define your own success. No matter what you use to measure your site’s growth, be sure to set goals that are realistic. Don’t expect 80% week over week growth – it simply won’t happen over the long term. Instead, set your goals moderately and well in advance so that you have an achievable goal to work towards. For me, the goals involve page views and feed readers; if I can keep increasing these, I’m meeting my goals with The Simple Dollar.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Don’t Give Up, or back to the previous one, The Content Comes First.

A blog, on the other hand, is a living, breathing entity. People become regular readers of blogs and visit them on a continuous regular basis. They’re likely to tell their friends about sites. When they visit the site, they want to see the fresh new content, not dodge ads over and over again.

Many people take ad placement information about static sites and try to apply them to blogs. They plaster ads and various other web gizmos all over the place in an attempt to grab the reader’s attention in any way possible.

What ends up happening, however, is a content overload, leaving the site almost unusable for readers. Take a look at this example, taken from PC Magazine’s news site. This is a site that is taking ads to the extreme, even for a static page. Yet the site is constantly updated, making the site closer to a blog than to a pure static site. The result? You couldn’t pay me to read that website.

Here is the real recipe for maximizing your ad earnings.

Write good content before anything else. Readers don’t come to your site for ads – they come for content. Worry about the content above everything else so that you have people to look at your ads to begin with.

Determine how static your site is. Compare the number of hits your front page, your RSS feed, and the last few days worth of posts get compared to your archives. As your blog ages, the weight will gradually shift to your more static archives, away from your front page, so you can get away with ads that are closer to those for a static site (i.e., more ads above the fold and such). As a young blog without many entrants from Google, heavy ad placements will have a negative effect on your readers and will make it hard for you to build up a long-term healthy base.

In short, minimize your ads early on and, when you build up an archive of good content and Google has assigned you a fairly steady page rank (after about six months of steady blogging or so), you can look at more advertisement placement. When you’re young, the focus should be content above all, so be subtle with the ads early on so you can maximize your readership.

Positive readers attract positive readers – negative readers attract nothing. Examine your own pages and try to think like a reader, ignoring your own ad returns. If you find a page on your site to be cluttered with ads, think about how your reader must feel. If I visit a site where the ads are overwhelming, I don’t like it by default and I have minimal interest in linking to it.

Use only one ad above the fold. This sounds crazy, but it works: include only one ad at the top of the page that’s visible when the window opens, and make it an image ad. This ad will stick out to your readers because it’s the only one and will be much more likely to grab their attention and generate a click than a bunch of ads. This is especially true for young blogs; if you have sites that are very static where most of your readers come in from search engines straight into your archives, you can add more ads.

Blending text ads only works to trick readers. If you’re trying to make text ads look like the rest of your site, you’re just seeking to trick readers that come in from search engines. If someone accidentally clicks on an ad on your site and goes to some crummy offer that they don’t like, they will think negatively about what you’re doing. Many people say “blend” to maximize earnings; I say “don’t blend” unless your site is highly static.

Don’t interrupt cohesive thoughts with ads. If you make it so that a reader has to jump over an ad to continue reading an article you’ve posted, you’re annoying the reader and reducing the positive feelings they’ll have for your site. Ads between pieces of content (between posts) have most of the positives of such “in the body” ads, but eliminate most of the negatives.

The basic rule of thumb is this: don’t annoy your readers, especially early on when you don’t have a lot of readers. Hold off on the heavy ads and you’ll do much better in the long run.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, Money Doesn’t Matter, or back to the previous one, Inspire Yourself.

Inspiration for great posts is much like the formation of a pearl within an oyster. An oyster lives in a relatively sandy environment, and on occasion a small grain of sand will slip inside the oyster and begin to form a beautiful pearl over time. In other words, for any great post, there is a moment of inspiration (the sand) and a period of cultivation (the formation of the pearl).

Looking at cultivation For some of us, the “cultivation” period is very short; we want to write the post as soon as we come up with the idea; for others, it’s a much longer period where the idea gestates and grows until it is a perfect pearl. This is a matter of personality difference, one that is difficult to find advice on because we all write differently.

The area where we overlap, however, is the inspiration, and we all wish we had more of it. Much like the oyster in the water, though, there are a few things we can do to increase our chances of finding more inspiration.

Move to a sandier area. Subtly change your daily habits so you’re more open to inspirational moments. For The Simple Dollar, I did this by adding Money Magazine and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance to my regular magazine browses at the newsstand, adding CNBC to my list of “favorite” television channels that I surf through (I have about eight of them), and listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio show when I’m in his listening area. These are just subtle changes, but they provide more opportunities for ideas to find their way into my head.

Keep the sand stirred up in the water. Actively seek out opportunities for ideas to come along. This includes reading other blogs on your topic, browsing link aggregators like reddit, and reading print media on your topic (for me, this would include Money Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, as well as infinite numbers of books). Engaging your mind in a topic is the best way to plant the seeds for great ideas.

Open ourselves up a little more. Question everything you read within the topic. If you read something that engages you, ask yourself what you don’t understand about it, and try to find out more. Read specific subtopics that you’re weak on and try to understand what they’re saying (I do this with stocks).

Let inspiration come to you. At the same time, don’t spend all of your time thinking about the topic. Most of the times, ideas grow in our brains when we’re thinking about other things, so enjoy a wide variety of other things. Once you’ve set the sand inside the oyster in your head, the pearl will continue to grow even if you’re focused on other things.

Don’t spit out the sand. Sometimes we simply forget the core of a great idea when it pops up while we’re traveling or doing something unrelated. My best strategy for avoiding this is to keep an idea diary in which I can jot down those spare ideas when they come to me, then look over the ideas later just to make sure I haven’t lost that little bit of inspiration.

The world is your oyster, of course; you just need to be ready for it.

Building a Better Blog for 2007 is a month-long series at The Simple Dollar, outlining steps you can take to build a long-term healthy blog that will attract readers. Jump ahead to the next essay, The Content Comes First, or back to the previous one, Respond to Comments.