Successful blogging for business-11 must-do activities

In his presentation Jay talks about 11 must-do activities for successful blogging:

1.       Being specific: knowing who your blog audience is, what your blog is about and what similar blogs exist.

2.       Consistency: The more you blog, the easier it will be to build an audience for your blog. For example, you can write on a schedule, publish every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Writing on consecutive days can also help with blog traffic and you can build momentum between posts.

3.       Variety: Mix longer blog posts with shorter posts. Mix timely post with timeless posts. Mix text with video blog posts. Mix positive with negative. Mix personal with professional.

4.       Include images in every blog post. Use Flickr’s Creative Commons search engine to find images for your blog.

5.       Utility:  This means being helpful. Create free  tools that helps your readers. Create presentations. Publish checklists.

6.       Gravity: This is about building an anchor for your blog. A signature, routine series of posts that you can go back to with regularity. Produce posts that act as magnets.

7.       Humanity: Whether you are blogging as a solo entrepreneur or as part of a bigger business, being personal and showing yourself is critical. Blogging is PERSONAL. That’s the whole point. Have a prominent picture of yourself on every page. And if it’s a group blog, have thumbnail images of the author of each post.

8.       Community: Jay built a formula for fostering community on a blog. It’s called WFACT. W=Welcome. F=Facilitate. A=Answer every comment. C=Connect. T=Thank.

9.       Searchability: One of the primary benefits of blogging is that blogs do very well in search engine results. Hubspot released a study recently that showed that Web sites with a blog received 55% more traffic than those that didn’t have a blog.  Consider Google as the most important reader of your blog. It’s certainly a good idea to include search terms in your post URLs, titles, headlines, and subheads.

10.   Extensibility: Being a good blogger doesn’t end at your blog. It is considered good practice to spend time also reading and commenting on other blogs. Being a good commenter is a fantastic way to increase awareness for your own blog, provided you do it in an honest way, and always add to the conversation. In addition to blog commenting, there are other ways to repackage and extend your blog content. Create an ebook of your best posts or an email newsletter that combines your best posts with other interesting content.

11.   Virality: Use social media to promote your blog. It can be Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook or a niche platform. Experiment and find out what works for you and your readers. Only promote yourself and your work in social media if you promote other people as well. Reciprocity is key. Good headlines are also critical to attract blog visitors. Headlines rules include brevity, challenging conventional wisdom, using numbers/lists (like this one), using unexpected action words, and incorporating search engine keywords.

I hope these best practices will help you to become a more successful blogger over time.

Please comment and share any other blogging tips that you use.