Rule 1 ) A blog is not a social networking site

If you want to write a blog reporting the everyday events of your personal life,
it's probably only going to be of interest to your friends and neighbors and you're
better off getting a MySpace or a FaceBook and doing it there, because social n
etworking sites have a lot more tools to help you update your peers and family o
n your social life than a typical blog will.
Instead, on your blog you should look for a way to write articles that will be i
nteresting to everyone. If you're going to tell the story of your life, you must m
ake it interesting. If you assume your blog readers will care about your day at
school or work each day, you should also assume your blog readers will only be y
our family and one creepy guy from California. And your friends and family will
probably only be reading to be polite, if at all.
If you want to describe your day, that's natural. However, with only a few excepti
ons people won't want to read about it. You need to have something else to offer u
nless your life is very unusual or if you're a celebrity.
If the only reason you're blogging is to let your friends and family know how your
day was, stop here. You don't need any help. You aren't ever going to get much traf
fic, so don't worry about the rest of these tips because they're not going to help y
ou.
Rule 2 ) Do not check in
Ever. This doesn't mean not to check on your site. It means not to post to your bl
og just to tell the people reading that you're not going to post that day, or you
just wanted to let them know you're not dead. This ties into Rule 1, in that if yo
u're doing this it means you're telling your readers what you're up to or in this cas
e not doing.
Another good reason not to do this is because if you do, you'll end up with a lot
of posts that have no value, which is going to drag down the average value of yo
ur blog's content and drive readers away. Don't do it unless you are running your bl
og as a social networking site, in which case you should have stopped reading an
d made a social networking account instead on Rule 1. Stop reading now.
Rule 3 ) Write content people are going to want to read
I'm sure you already know somewhere in your mind that if you write something that's
boring or pointless you won't be getting any fans from it. People won't return to yo
ur site if they don't want to read what you've written.
If you write something they find useful however, like a review of a product, a g
uide to doing something they want to be able to do, or a story they enjoy you'll f
ind they're likely to come back again and again.
Rule 4 ) Check syntax and spelling in every post
If people find that you have poor grammar or that you can't spell, how can they ta
ke seriously anything you have to say? This isn't really fair, I know. I've always h
ad some trouble spelling, even though I have plenty to write that's worth reading.
The sad truth though is that you'll lose readers if you can't spell, or if you writ
e in 133T, or if you otherwise ignore the rules of language. You're going to be mu
ch better off double checking everything you write with a spell checker and a di
ctionary in hand to make sure everything's correct.
Rule 5 ) After you write a post, don't publish it immediately
Go watch a YouTube video, a movie, or go to bed and sleep on it first. After you'v
e finished doing something else, come back and read your post again. You'll be sur
prised how often you'll be able to pick out mistakes or places where your article
drags that you couldn't find before. Tapping back into rule 4, you're likely to find
spelling and grammar errors which would have otherwise lowered people's opinion o
f your writing. You'll also be more likely to notice if your post is missing detai
ls, or if there was a better way to word things in your post. Editing is a big p
art of writing, and distancing yourself from the writing with time will help the
editing process.
Rule 6 ) Write your blog as a professional
Write every post as if you were going to submit it for pay to a magazine or anot
her serious publisher. A publisher wouldn't want poor work, and the reason for tha
t is simply because poor work is bad for the publication's reputation and reader b
ase. Similarly, you shouldn't post poor work because it's bad for the reputation and
reader base of your blog. If people visit your blog and see that your site's cont
ent is poor on average, they're likely to leave and never come back. When someone
visits your blog, you want them to read your work, enjoy what they've read, and le
ave thinking that your content is very high quality.
Rule 7 ) Pick a category around which your blog should be centered
You'll find that blogs are more popular when the reader can be sure your next arti
cle will be in a similar category to the last one, or at least that it will fall
into one of a predictable group of categories. Someone interested in technology
isn't necessarily interested in philosophy or rant blogs.
If you can't pick just one topic, which is often my dilemma, then pick a limited g
roup of categories to write about which will likely have a lot of overlap in rea
ders. This blog for example is for writers. It hosts articles about writing. It
has posts about a variety of topics useful to writers on the internet, including
blogging, novel & story writing, and freelancing because many of the writers on
the internet will share interest in all of those topics. They wouldn't however ne
cessarily be interested in hearing a rant about some new cellphone I got.
Rule 8 ) Don't steal content
You're going to find yourself inspired by what others write about. You might somet
imes even want to write about the same things. Don't ever let yourself take their
ideas or writing for your own though. This is common sense for most of us, but t
here are people out there to whom this may not occur. Stealing content from othe
r web sites is on one hand illegal and on the other hand it's pointless and overal
l bad for your blog.
You might be able to steal a couple of visitors from the original author, but in
general the original article is likely to have a much higher page rank and more
links, and is going to get most of the traffic it would anyway. On the other ha
nd, you're going to hurt your reputation in the community if you steal content. Yo
ur work will be seen at best as unoriginal and probably all out theft and you're g
oing to do yourself a lot of damage.
Rule 9 ) Do not pay for links
Links are vital to your site's success. Links, in all likelihood, are going to be
the main source of visitors for your sight both because the links bring visitors
and because they make you look good to a search engine. Paying for links will d
o you more harm than good though. People say you get what you pay for, but in th
e world of blogging, if you have to pay for a link, you're going to be punished wi
th low traffic from the links and lower placement in search engines. Google and
other search providers don't like black hat SEO methods like paid linking, and wil
l make sure your traffic stays low if you use that sort of tactic.
Rule 10 ) Use the available white hat SEO methods
Rule 9 is basically not to use the black hat SEO, but it's also important to use t
he white hat ones. These include things like submitting your best articles to ar
ticle databases and Blog Carnivals. These will produce publicity, love, and visi
bility within the community. Often, they'll generate you links which will boost yo
ur search engine rankings.
There's a lot that I could say about white hat SEO, and probably a lot about white
hat SEO that I don't know yet. Here are a few tips though. Make sure that sites y
ou get to link to you are on the up and up. A site that links to yours that Goog
le views as bad is likely to lose you points, especially if you're getting lots of
links from low quality sites. It should be fairly easy to tell whether what you'r
e doing is white hat or black hat. Don't make an effort to get sites that seem low
quality, or that seem like link farms to link to you. Instead encourage linking
from sites that seem similar or a little better than yours. Preferably ones wit
h content that will be useful to your readers.
You should also do key word research so you can place quality key words and phra
ses into your posts that will get the attention of the search engines, and let t
hem know what your post is about. Think about what someone would type into Googl
e when they were looking for the information provided in you post, and try to sl
ip those words or phrases into your article a few times each.

If you follow those 10 simple rules, it still doesn't guarantee that you'll succeed
in the world of blogging. It will however give you a much better shot. You'll find
that the successful blogs already do these things, and that the blogs that aren't
worth reading ignore them. Many people can follow these rules by instinct, but
if hearing these rules came as a surprise to you you may find trying them reward
ing.