Rule number one is make it relevant: to someone, preferably to somepeople, and, if you can, to everyone. Evidently, blogging is as much about doing it as consuming it, and there are a great many people blogging, so this post fulfills that criteria.

Second, the title shouldn’t be too long, too obscure or too short. Give it seven or eight words that will ensure the potential reader knows (more or less) what it is about. My title here isn’t imaginative (not like some on this blog, eg. The Google Discrepancy) but it says what it does between the H2s.

Rule the third, is to keep your post short enough to remain on point and entertaining, and long enough to be informative. This is a judgement call of course, but it has to be said there are a lot of non-posts out there tagging along in the wake of meme-leaders.

And this brings me to the fourth: don’t follow the zeitgeist, be the zeitgeist. What will make your post readable is you, not the subject (although the subject has to interest you). The bloggers who boast innumerable subscribers are the true originals, the guys and gals who write about their obsessions and do it well.

So to the fifth element in a truly outstanding post, get the subject right for you: now this might be in conflict with Rule One – making it relevant - but if it is relevant to you its going to be relevant to someone else. Having said that, if I find something interesting enough to write several hundred words about, and I don’t actually end up writing it then and there, someone else will. Get in there first.

That’s the sixth rule, get in there first. Don’t haver, hesitate or procrastinate – just write it. You get something wrong, someone out there will correct you in the comments, and that’s to the good, it’s traffic and traffic art our internet god.

Seventh rule: tell your truth in your voice. Getting in there first will mean you will post from the hip, and that sort of rapidfire engagement will mean you won’t get time to dissemble, nor will you be able to work the material up into some highly wrought treatise. You don’t need to, blogging is about moment - let the rest of the internet worry about posterity.

Eight is about the wider technical context: give your post wings. For example, Twitter it, load your rss feed into Facebook, use a service like Zemanta to reference ideas (like zeitgeist), if you have several blogs, create a metablog to aggregate all your work, use photos from your Flickr account and videos from YouTube.com, and ensure you enable social bookmarking as well –services like Digg can really help find your readership.

Lastly, SEO. Forget it. Just post every day according to rules 1 through 8 and you shall find blogging Nirvana.

That’s not lastly. Of course it’s not. I forgot to mention the power of ten: If all else fails write a top ten.

PS. Humour is good too

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under blogging consultancy, opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.