Blog Etiquette

You will need to know a little something about blog etiquette if you want to have a successful weblog. Learning and understanding this conduct will not only allow you to gain a respectable reputation as a blogger, but in the long run, it can help increase the amount of traffic you get to your site.

If you haven't noticed lately, everyone who's anyone has a blog. But not all of these sites are successful or even well-written. In fact, a large percentage of blogs fail for many reasons, including laziness by the owner to update, lack of topic ideas and the blog itself not having personality. In other words, the blogger lacks etiquette.

In order to be successful in today's blog market, you really have to know how not only to write a blog, but present it and market it to where visitors will continue to come back for more. You need to know the unwritten rules for blogging, otherwise known as blog etiquette.

While these aren't written in stone, any successful blogger knows there are certain things you should and shouldn't do when starting, designing and updating your blogs.

• Never blog about blogging: Keep your topics to interesting items such as music, current events, lifestyles, religion, food, technology or something else that will appeal to readers.
• Don't plagiarize: It is a cardinal sin to plagiarize someone else's work. If you don't know what to write, then skip it. Don't steal what someone else has done.
• Research your topics: Don't contribute to the oversaturated market of blogs out there. You won't get too much traffic if you blog about celebrities, gadgets, politics, sports, Internet marketing, parenting or movies. An exception to this rule would be if you find a topic within this niche that has not yet been explored. Then it's OK to write about these things.
• Use spell and grammar checks: This is huge. Misspelled words and improper grammar can be very difficult on the eyes. Blogs that have these types of mistakes are often thought of as unintelligent and most readers will not return to look for updates.
• Regularly update your blog: Want readers to come back for more? Then make sure you update it on a regular basis, roughly two or three times a week.
• Make sure each post has a title: You will want your readers to know what you have written about that day.
• Use links to related information: If you are talking about something you saw on the news or read online, then please, post a link to it (and make sure the link works).
• Provide feeds: Get with the times and provide news feeds to your regular readers. RSS, XML and Atom are a few.
• Make archived posts readily available: Many times bloggers refer back to something they previously wrote about. Besides linking to it in your text, also have archived posts available. Readers will want to see what your wrote about a few months ago.
• Know what you are talking about: The more expertise you have on a topic, the better your blog will read.
• Keep posts short and to the point: You can always say what you're thinking in a few sentences. Your readers will lose interest if you go on and on for many paragraphs.

The weblog owner isn't the only one who has a responsibility when it comes to maintaining blogs -- the reader does as well. Here are a few rules of blog etiquette that users with which users should abide:

• Leave comments: How else is a blogger going to know if he or she is communicating the topics clearly. Comments give a blog personality; they help keep topics lively, timely and interesting.
• Back up your information: If you disagree with what someone has written and have proof that the facts may be wrong, then please leave a corresponding URL in the comment.
• No third party conversations: Don't use a blog's feedback section to hold a conversation with someone other than the blogger; that's why there is e-mail or instant messenger.
• Don't use the comments section to advertise your blog: Your profile can provide that information.
• Stick to the topic at hand: Going off on a tangent about something other than what the blog's topic is about will only get your post deleted.
• Spell and grammar check: Again, you want to seem intelligent and like you know what you are talking about when you leave comments.
• If you don't have something nice to say don't say anything at all: Unless you are calling out the blogger on something he or she said, don't be judgmental or nasty with your comments. That is just plain rude.
• Spread the word: If you like what you read, then share the love with others.

If you are a serious weblog writer, blog etiquette probably comes naturally. After all, you know you want the traffic to come to your site because if it is set up as such, it will earn you some residual or passive income. However, if writing was not your strong point in school and you still want to set up a blog, heed this information. It will come in handy.

If you have a "rule of blogging" that you'd like to share, please leave it in the comments section below.

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