One thing that I have been noticing lately is that bloggers are adding every widget under the sun to their blog. There is content, and there is advertising, other than that, you shouldn’t be mucking up your blog.

Some Things To Avoid

Stat Trackers that Require an Image. There are so many web statistic trackers now that you can avoid the ones that require an image back to their service. Things like ExtremeTracking aren’t as featured as some of their competitors anyways. I like Google Analytics, as well as AWStats to watch over how my blogs are doing.

Bonus: Of course there is Feedburner to track how my RSS feed is doing, which I highly recommend for all bloggers.

Separate Links For Each RSS Service. I don’t mind people putting a single RSS badge on their blogs, but when you add a small graphic for every RSS reader service. That gets to be a little ridiculous, and it can push other more important things from their deserved spot on your blog.

Hundreds of Categories. Not only does having more than a dozen or two categories listed on your front page look cluttered, but it also makes sure new readers won’t be able to find or focus on your best content. If you are going to make a crazy number of categories, find a way to only display the top dozen in your sidebar, and create a categories or tags page for the rest.

More than Three Advertising Programs. Do you really need to have every piece of screen above the fold be advertisements? It seems this has only gotten worse since Google AdSense allowed competing ads to be put on the same page.

I know you want to monetize your content, but I will never come back to your blog, no matter how great the content is, and I know many others would agree with me on this.

Conclusion

Every couple of months, take a look at your blog, and decide if there is anything you can remove. Simplifying things will keep your site focused and your readers will keep coming back.

Originally posted on August 17, 2007 @ 3:41 am

When you first start out as a blogger, be it pro, or just for fun, you will want to quickly assess your audience, and get a handle on what they are looking for from your site while balancing what your goals are. Some sites do really well with longer, detailed posts while others do great with shorter more succinct posts.

Finding Your Comfort Zone

You have to decide what you will be comfortable with, and really that is probably going to be the strongest deciding factor. Try out a few lengths and time how long it takes you to write out an article.

Will you be able to spend that long each time you write a post for your blog?

If it is too long, try cutting it back. For your first few entries you might want to take time to edit them down so that you use as few words as possible to convey your idea. As you get more experienced at self-editing, you will get faster at it thus creating better posts.

If you realized that your post only took a few minutes to write, and you wanted to create something longer, don’t fret too much, as you will have days where you will have to research a topic before you can write intelligently about it, and on those days, you will be glad you “gave” yourself those extra few minutes, rather than using all your time writing the actual post.

Your Audience’s Expectations

When choosing the length of post you want to aim for, remember that people like consistency. If you chose to write longer, more detailed posts, then your visitors are going to expect that from you, and might not be responsive to the few posts that are short on details and information.

The same goes with shorter posts though. You will attract an audience over time that expects such things from you, and they might not read a post that you spend an hour writing that goes into great detail, and so once you chose to go “short” or “long”, you will want to try to remain as consistent as possible.

Conclusion

It will really be up to you to decide. From my own personal experiences, I would say that shorter posts are easier to read, as most people don’t like reading large blocks of text online, and doing many shorter, more concise posts can actually equalize out the search engine advantage of doing content and keyword rich posts.

Either way, the goal is to continually, and constantly publish new content for your readers.

Originally posted on July 18, 2007 @ 2:22 am