The document provides 13 best practices for blogging. It recommends identifying your target audience and focusing content on their needs. Bloggers should teach and provide useful information rather than directly selling. Linking to past relevant posts and other blogs can draw in new readers and search engine attention. Guest blogging and inviting guest posts introduces a blogger's content to new audiences. Images, keywords, social sharing, email updates, and submissions to directories can help optimize a blog's discoverability and engagement.

1. Blogging Best Practices
1. What’s your purpose? Who is your target audience?
Identify your desired audience. By doing this you can hone in on the needs of your
audience and focus on specific blog content. Your number one purpose should be to entice
and satisfy the needs of your readers.
2. Teach, don’t sell.
Readers come to your blog hoping to find something useful. Focus on being helpful and
giving trustworthy information. Creating helpful posts, links and commentary will build
your reader’s trust in you.
3. Linking to your own posts.
Readers and search engines appreciate links. When you reference your own material you
can potentially draw visitors to your other content and it gives search engines access to
your past posts. But don’t add too many links to your other posts as it distracting to the
reader and search engines will discount it.
4. Network with other blogs.
Referencing other blog posts with a link can potentially lead to your posts being shared and
gaining more audience and subscribers. It can also cultivate a new reader from the blog
owner you linked to in your post.
5. Be a guest and invite guest bloggers.
When you first start your blog it can be tough to convince other bloggers to allow you to be
a guest blogger on their blog. This is when your friends and professional connections are
critical. Contact these individuals who have respected blogs and that know and trust you.
Ask them to let you be a guest blogger and return the favor allowing them to post an article
on your blog.
Guest blogging gets your name and your firm’s name out there and provides the
opportunity to link back to your own blog.
6. Make your blog content search engine friendly.
Your blog post should be attractive to both the reader and the search engines. Be sure to
include keywords in your article, headline and subheads that your target audience is
searching for. Wondering what keywords to include? One tool to help you identify these
keywords is Google’s keyword generator. You can see what Google users are searching for
over the past 30 days. Try to avoid broad general terms. More specific keywords or
keyword phrases will help your blog be found when a search is conducted.
7. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Including appealing images relevant to your blog post can attract your readers’ attention
and encourages to read the post. Not handy with the camera for posting your own
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2. pictures? There are numerous third-party sources to find free images such as flickr and
Google Images as well as some paid resources such as istockPhoto.com. Always be sure to
optimize images with your keywords in the file names.
8. Don’t leave the reader hanging.
Allow comments on your posts and when you do get them answer and acknowledge as
many as humanly possible. A good blogger shows gratitude and appreciation to their
readers that supports them. If the comment is an interesting enough issue or question
contact the poster directly. Treat every comment poster as a potential subscriber to your
blog and as a potential client.
9. Share through your social media accounts.
Social media provides an array of tools and resources to help spread the word about your
blog. If you haven’t already, register and fully complete your profile on the major social
networks such as -- LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Connect with users on these
sites with whom you share a professional relationships and start following industry
influencers.
Every time you post a new article update your status on LinkedIn or send out a tweet.
Interact in discussions and jump in when there is appropriate and a relevant topic. Share a
link to your blog post. But remember to teach, don’t sell.
10. Simplify subscriptions.
Don’t make it difficult for a reader to subscribe to your blog. There are two basic ways
readers can sign up for your blog – an RSS feed or by email subscription. Have these
features clearly visible. Readers are accustomed to looking for the subscription features at
the top of the blog.
11. Let your reader be able to share your post.
Let your readers be able to spread the word about your post with their social network.
Include the share buttons from the major social media sites.
12. Use your email connections.
Don’t ignore your email list. These individuals have opted-in to receive information from
you. With each new blog post send out a short email to your connections to let them know
about new posts just waiting to be read.
13. Spread the word.
 Include your blog link on all your social media network profiles.
 Include a link of your recent post such as the article title in your email signature block.
 Include your blog URL on your business cards and marketing materials.
 Participate in forums and Q & A sites. This provides an opportunity to tastefully
demonstrate your expertise and a link back to your blog.
 Submit your blog URL to blog directories.
 Submit your blog URL to search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo.
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