Simon’s Notes

Throughout the day I spend a certain amount of time browsing around other blogs on the blogospere, and while this can easily be my favorite time of the day, I do come across some blogs that leave a little to be desired.

I’m not a blogging expert, but I can tell when something doesn’t appeal to me, and I guess since the real blog expert is, in fact, the reader that makes me an expert. I’ve always said that simple is best, and when it comes to blogging that is so true. So when you find yourself checking out that awesome new widget, or that nifty little plugin, the question you should ask yourself is ‘will this end up being clutter on my blog?’ And that question doesn’t only hold true for widgets.

In this post I’ve compiled a list of 10 blogging commandments that hopefully will help you make your readers experience a little more enjoyable, and as a result you might even earn some more faithful followers.

1. If you have nothing to write about, get up and go for a walk, clear your head. You don’t want to end up writing rubbish.
2. Unless you are having bad problems with bot spam, there is no reason whatsoever for you to make us readers type that long string of characters before every comment. Don’t make your blog comment unfriendly and then complain about not getting comments.
3. Please don’t make your comments open in a new window. There is absolutely no reason for this, unless you’re worried that we’ll navigate away from your page once we’re done commenting, which, most of the time, we won’t. Opening comments in a new window is just a hassle.
4. Flashing banners hurt the eye, and they distract from your content, thats bad for you as the blogger and us as the readers. If you must put banners on your blog make sure they blend nicely and stay away from flashers like the plague.
5. Adding your blog to every single blog directory on the planet does not get you more traffic. And displaying all those little directory buttons in a long row on your sidebar makes the blog look cheap, please try not to do this. Focus your time and energy on methods that will actually generate more traffic like SEO and quality link exchanges.
6. If you’re not sure what colors go well together than ask a friend. There is nothing worse than a blog where the color scheme looks like last night’s dinner, after you’ve eaten it.
7. It is better to keep your posts short and relevant instead of long and boring. Don’t worry that your posts don’t look like a small book, just say what you have to say and be done. I’ve seen some very intriguing blogs where the posts were maybe 50 words long.
8. Don’t over monetize your blog. If I started this blog again that would be one of the things I would do differently. I put too many ads here from the beginning so I’ve had to take quite a bit down. Most of the top bloggers suggest that when starting a new blog you should not monetize it at all until you have a steady stream of traffic flowing through it.
9. With a little bit of work, its quite easy to make your blog look very nice and unique. Stay away from standard templates that everybody else uses. If you’re using blogger I would suggest the minima template as its the easiest to customize. Start by creating and using your own banner.
10. Pictures can do wonders for your blog. This is something that I’m just beginning to realize, now I try to incorporate a picture as often as possible into my posts.

There is still quite a lot of things that can be done to make a blog truly great, and I am in no way the expert, I learn something new every day. I guess that would be the most important commandment, ‘never stop learning’.

And don’t worry if your blog fails on all these counts, just keep learning and changing and eventually we’ll all get there. I wish I could show you the first blog I started, thankfully I deleted it, but it broke every single rule in the book. My first blog was positively disgusting :)).

If you have any more tips or commandments to add please leave them in a comment, I’m sure there are plenty of things you would like to see different on this blog.

Simon

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Filed under: Blogging by Simon Rodrigues