Blog Relations

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Content is the life blood of your site.  Nothing else really matters.  Get the content right, an visitors will come to you, you will get known, and you will succeed.

1. Write for your visitors – not promotion for yourself.   Yes, be clear about what you can do for people.  No – don’t go on about it.  Publish useful, interesting, and entertaining content for your users.
2. Never, never write marketing spiel on the web.  Visitors are ruthless and will swiftly move on.
3. If you are a newsy site – publish often, add your own take, invite comment.
4. If you are more or a timeless site, think in terms of building a resource – like a section of a library – people will come to you for what… Poems? Recipes? Fashion-tips?  Stock-Picking?  Medical Advice?  Pictures of Pedigree Poodles?  Build up your resource over time.
5. Divide your content into no more than 6 main categories – And then start making sub-categories under them.  This should keep you on-topic.
6. Break up your thoughts into lists and short paragraphs.  People scan web pages, and are put off by solid blocks of text.
7. Don’t copy and paste from other sites.  There’s no point.  You will never outrank the original for more than a day or so – and then you will be tagged as rubbish by the search engines and by users.
8. Be friendly and informal, and always courteous even when you disagree with somebody.  The web is about making friends.
9. Write as if you were talking to a friend – this helps bring out your personality.
10. Work in bits of your life to help you find your own voice. You don’t have to lay your soul bare, but you can give a little bit of yourself away.