Amid feasting and dog barking at our July meeting, our creative group came up with the following tips for successful blogging.

Why blog?

1. Increase traffic to your site, through links on the ideaXchange blog.
2. It’s food for Google. You’ll rank higher, which will get you more traffic.
3. Establish credibility. Show yourself to be an expert.
4. Practice makes you a better writer.
5. Network with other people in your field.

Getting involved

1. Comment elsewhere. Include a link back to your site (or this blog). Traffic increases. Rinse, repeat.
2. Set up Google Alerts, so you know what blogs are talking about your interests. Then you can go and comment on them.

Post-worthiness

1. Websites that you read that help you with your creativity
2. Books/resources that help you, that you like
3. Business issues that have affected you. (Be careful to not malign or speak too privately.)
4. Tips about your craft
5. Most important: is it of value to others. This includes comments. Speak only if it’s valuable.

Writing tips

1. Brevity
2. Proper spelling (OS X tip: type beginning of word, hit option-escape, and recommendations will pop up.)
3. Good grammar
4. Clarity. Don’t vomit onto the screen.
5. Be conversational. Use your own voice.

Tips

1. Well-crafted link text. Put your links within the context of the sentence (instead of writing “click here”). If blogs that link to you don’t do this, it’s okay to write to them and ask them to change it to something more descriptive.
2. Use links when you can. More you link, the more attention you’ll get.
3. Well-crafted titles. It helps with search results, and it grabs people’s attention. In pages of similar search results, yours will stand out.
4. Subheads. Break up your posts into sections, and Google will understand the context of your post better.
5. Tag your post with categories.

Formatting

1. You can use Textile, a simple markup syntax, for adding bold, italic, lists and links.
2. Or, you can use the visual editor. Turn it on by going to your profile.

Images

1. Only use images you have the rights to use. Or give really excellent credit.
2. Don’t make it too big. An inch or two is big enough (150 pixels wide or so.)
3. Images should be 72 dpi.