John Wesley from “Pick the Brain” published an interesting article titled “27 Lessons Learned on the Way to 3000 Visits a Day and 2200 RSS Subscribers.” Basically he is sharing what he learned on the first six months of his successful blog. My favorite lesson from the article is:
If you aren’t sure a post is good, sit on it for a day. If you still aren’t convinced, delete it. A bad post is worse than no post. Bad posts make people question if your blog is worth reading. When you make a bad post (and you will) learn from it and move on.
Below you will find a summary of all the points, the full description is on his blog:
- Help people solve a problem and differentiate yourself
- Be prepared to invest 2-3 years before seeing any serious returns
- Make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to your RSS feed
- Offer a full feed
- A bad post is worse than no post
- Be prepared to completely run out of ideas after the first 3-4 months
- It’s not always what you know, who you know is important too
- Write catchy headlines and list posts
- Make the opening paragraph as compelling as possible
- Courteously encourage friends, family, and casual acquaintances to vote up and link to your posts
- Don’t write every post for the social sites
- Listen carefully to every piece of feedback but don’t be a slave to it
- Experiment. Take chances. Piss a few people off
- Always look for a different angle
- Don’t participate in every meme or trade links with everyone who asks
- Write about your life in a way that’s relevant to your topic
- Make people think
- Don’t be anxious to plaster Google Ads all over the place
- Design matters
- Posting comments on other blogs is overrated
- Respond to your commenters
- Obsessively reading other blogs and checking traffic stats are not productive activities
- Once you have a bit of success don’t flaunt it
- Make use of blog carnivals
- Display your best posts on every page
- Read blogs about blogging
- Do what works for you
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