In high school, I was friends with an individual who repeatedly acted as if he knew everything anyone was going to say. If you got him started on a subject, he would completely dominate the conversation with minutae and commentary on every aspect of the issue at hand, while everyone else sat around staring at him.

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.

Most bloggers are familiar with the “Digg effect,” a flood of traffic that comes from reaching the front page of Digg, a popular social bookmarking site (if you want to know more about it, you can see my observations on it). Similar traffic boosts occur whenever a site becomes “popular” in any well-travelled social bookmarking site, and the rewards are obvious: huge numbers of page views from real readers.

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.

Recently, I visited a very interesting blog that focused on personal finance and political issues targeting twentysomethings. The author had a very distinctive voice and he clearly had his audience defined, yet there was still one problem: he was often posting things and making statements that were going to drive away a big part of his readership. Case in point: I was greeted with a photoshopped picture of Paris Hilton with a disconcerting comment added across her chest and a post written in rather crude language about the dumbing down of America. Twentysomethings who are reading a personal finance / political blog are likely going to be fairly conservative and are going to be interested in information on how to get ahead in this world. The author got the twentysomething demographic spot on, but he missed the boat on the rest of his audience.

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.

Once you’ve figured out who your audience is, it becomes much easier to determine whether or not content is appropriate for your site. The simple question of whether or not it appeals to this group is enough to decide whether or not it should be posted on the site.

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.

Some of you are probably sitting there stunned right now. Without search engine placement, it’s very hard for a site to get a lot of attention from search engines, isn’t it? Yet I’m fairly sure that (to a degree) even SEO professionals will agree with the premise here when I make the case for it.

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.

Once you’ve reached a point where you have a healthy number of posts, you’ll find that even your best, most original ideas overlap with ideas you’ve posted on in the past. Some people see this as a problem; they worry that they’re out of original ideas. Successful bloggers, however, see it as an opportunity.

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.

I like to write long posts. I’ve discovered that length doesn’t matter, so I write and write to my heart’s content until I feel like I’ve completed my thoughts and said what I want to say.

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.

Every once in a while, you’ll write a post that is a surefire winner, but quite often, our most popular posts come as a relative surprise. You’ll post something and out of nowhere will come comments and people linking to the posts. How did that happen?

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.